International Federation of Medical Students Associations
The International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization representing associations of medical students. Currently, it maintains 133 member organisations from 123 countries around the world.
exchange.ifmsa.org is the exchanges database used to coordinate professional and research exchanges.
Database reliability & accountability
Exchange.ifmsa.org, consisting of SCOPE and SCORe databases, is the most complex (and probably the most important) platform used by IFMSA. Unfortunately, before our collaboration, it was also the most bug-ridden.
The issues that IFMSA dealt with when interacting with the exchange platform ranged from database slowness or even unavailability, to students not being able to log in the platform, having access where they aren’t supposed to or not being able to send their application forms.
Exchange Database Portal
Instead of attempting to fix something that cannot be repaired, we all agreed that the best solution is to rebuild the database using modern tools and provide maintenance for it in the long-term.
The new custom students Exchange Database Portal replaced the old system into a single platform that accommodates all complex technical requirements, automates most of the processes and follows the internal workflows.
The portal was built using a Laravel framework and hosted on AWS servers with 3 working environments for the customer – development, staging, and production.