Rapid scaling of sundhed.dk due to Covid-19

Motivation

This project will examine, analyse and document the sudden and rapid scaling of the Danish health-tech platform www.sundhed.dk.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the danish national health organisation sundhed.dk experienced an unseen amount of requests to their services. One of the main factors was the governmental legal requirement of a vaccination passport which was issued by sundhed.dk.

To accommodate such a sudden change, it would be beneficial to outsource a lot of back-end infrastructure to a monitored and automatic service that scales with user demand, but due to the sensitivity of public health data this was not an option.

Scaling of information systems is an important discipline within computer science and for business practioners. Any companies as well as public organizations that continues to grow will ultimately need to figure out how to scale up systems.

The challenges related to the scaling of systems are seldom technological alone. In many cases, scalability problems are also caused by the organizational structure, the roles and the people involved with scalability projects.

Many studies within information systems research have focused on the problems resulting from inabilities to scale to new demands (e.g. growing user database).

In this project we will study the scaling of the health-tech platform sundhed.dk that can be characterized by an extreme case in the sense that it was a success compared to most other public scalability projects. Through the case study we hope to identify, describe and analyze the critical situations that led to the successful scaling of sundhed.dk

Project activities:

• Literature review
• Interviews based on the critical incident technique
• Conference paper and presentation at the 36th Bled eConference – Digital Economy and Society: The Balancing Act for Digital Innovation in Times of Instability 2023

Method

This project will use the critical incident technique as primary framework to capture and identify the process and technical decisions that ultimately made it possible for sundhed.dk to scale their architecture to fit the demand.

It will furthermore extract general learnings about the scaling of microservices analysing the case inductively.

New knowledge about how to succesfully scale microservices.

• Improve the knowledge base on the AP degree in computer science.
• Provide the industry with new knowledge about how to succesfully scale information systems.
• Contribute to the academic scalability and health information technology literature through an empirical investigation of an extreme case study.