AWS Public Sector Blog

Building a connected healthcare ecosystem which drives value-based care outcomes with BioMark

Building a connected healthcare ecosystem which drives value-based care outcomes

Despite progress in the diagnostics and life science industries’ cloud adoption, there is still a gap in end-to-end digital solutions that enable clinicians to use diagnostic lab data to care for their patients. The need for a seamless ecosystem connecting doctors, patients, and laboratories on a single platform persists.

BioMark is a digital diagnostics and therapeutics company that offers cutting-edge solutions to more than 7,000 clinics and 63 hospitals in Southeast Asia. The company’s services are available in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam and Indonesia, where it provides over 30 million lab results for patients across these clinics. BioMark enables medical professionals to access lab results quickly and efficiently, allowing for faster and more accurate diagnosis and treatment. To build their digital solutions, they use Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Building a connected healthcare ecosystem at scale with cloud

BioMark was established as an electronic platform intended for clinicians to streamline the process of ordering clinical investigations for their patients and review results. The conventional method of ordering clinical investigations involved filling out an investigation form, attaching it to the patient’s sample, and waiting for a courier to pick up patient specimens several times a day in batches.

Afterward, the specimens would be transported to the central processing lab, where lab technicians would enter patient details into the laboratory systems and run the tests ordered by the family medicine doctor. Upon completion of sample processing, the technician would then print out the test results, sort them by clinic names, and distribute paper copies back to the family medical doctors who ordered the test for their patients.

The full turnaround time for this entire process was typically measured in days––anywhere from one to five, depending on the complexity and range of tests ordered.

BioMark’s suite of digital solutions for clinical labs support lab orders, lab results, and lab logistics and are aimed at reducing cost and time spent—from sample collection to results publication.

Previously, clinical labs relied on manual workflows to publish test results, but BioMark’s digital platform now enables clinicians to receive results within 2-3 hours, thereby improving the speed and efficiency of patient care.

One of the key benefits of BioMark’s digital platform is that it standardizes data entry and mitigates data entry errors, such as those generated by manual, hand-written forms, which otherwise can necessitate rerunning lab tests. This provides significant cost savings for in-vitro diagnostic labs––approximately 5–10% of the total operating cost. Additionally, BioMark helps reduce bottlenecks that can arise when waiting for lab results, so patients can receive timely care when abnormal results are detected.

In addition, BioMark has developed a patient mobile application to provide patients with greater access to their lab test results. BioMark launched this initiative to address the challenge of contacting patients individually to inform them of normal test results. Now, patients can access their health information more readily. This helps patients track their test results and monitor their progress over time, enabling them to make informed decisions regarding their healthcare needs.

To address the challenge of chronic disease control, BioMark’s patient support programs serve as a critical component of its ecosystem. These programs are designed to support third-party providers interested in treating chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes mellitus and hypertension, by embedding patients into a comprehensive ecosystem. This helps patients to better manage their conditions, which can help mitigate the effects of the disease and minimize secondary complications. These programs have resulted in patients improving their medication adherence by more than 30%.

BioMark uses AWS Lambda for its serverless computing needs and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to run its container applications. This reduces the total cost of ownership and the maintenance overhead of maintaining its infrastructure. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is used to cache frequently accessed data to improve performance and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to decouple the components and improve scalability during workload spikes. The company stores 30 million lab result data on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provide scalable, secure, and cost-efficient database management solutions that support comprehensive compliance controls with international regulations, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), while supporting patient data privacy. Plus, by using reserved instances and serverless infrastructure on AWS, BioMark optimized its total cost of ownership on AWS by 30%.

Like many other healthcare facilities, BioMark uses a hybrid approach of maintaining on-premise data centers and utilizing the cloud. With AWS Site-to-Site VPN, BioMark can establish secure, private connections between its partners’ and clients’ on-premises data centers and its cloud infrastructure. This helps BioMark extend its network and services to multiple regions in Southeast Asia while supporting the secure transmission of sensitive patient data and compliance with international regulations.

Lastly, security is a top priority. BioMark uses AWS services including AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to protect its applications and data from potential threats and keep patient data safe.

architectural diagram of the solution described in this blog

Figure 1. High level architecture diagram depicting how BioMark uses AWS services to run the platform. The services include Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, VPN, AWS Shield, AWS WAF,  and AWS KMS.

Supporting patient-first healthcare solutions in the cloud

The emergence of cloud-native digital healthcare solutions, exemplified by BioMark, is crucial in improving patient outcomes and advancing the paradigm of community-based population health. BioMark’s digital platform is transforming how providers and patients use diagnostic reports to accelerate patient care and help manage chronic diseases.

Through their services and patient support programs, BioMark aims to keep patients healthy in the community for an extended period, which ultimately improves the long-term quality of life adjusted years (QALY) and the quality of care delivered to patients. This approach aligns with the overarching objective of BioMark’s ecosystem, which is to promote patient-centered healthcare delivery, prioritize the needs of patients, and enhance their overall health outcomes.

Learn more about AWS for healthcare

Healthcare and life science organizations around the world are reinventing how they collaborate, make data-driven clinical and operational decisions, enable precision medicine, and decrease the cost of care. To help healthcare and life science organizations achieve their business and technical goals, AWS for Health provides an offering of AWS services and AWS Partner solutions, used by thousands of customers globally. For more information about how AWS assists in critical healthcare missions around the globe, visit the AWS for healthcare hub, or contact the AWS Public Sector Team.

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Dr. Anthony Lawrence

Dr. Anthony Lawrence

Dr. Anthony Lawrence is the chief executive officer (CEO) of BioMark, a digital ecosystem that connects doctors, clinics, laboratories, and patients together. Under his watch, BioMark has gone from zero to over 7,000 clinics in two years, and it now has business presence in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, and the Philippines, making it the largest real time clinical distribution platform of its kind in Southeast Asia with a throughput of over 20,000 patients daily. Anthony graduated with double degrees in Medicine and Biomedical Sciences from University College Dublin. He has a Master of Internal Medicine from the University of Edinburgh and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Leonardo Lumbay Jr.

Leonardo Lumbay Jr.

Leonardo is a senior solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He works closely with healthcare organizations to accelerate innovation through AWS cloud services. With more than10 years of healthcare IT experience, he serves as a trusted advisor to healthcare business and technical leaders. Leveraging deep expertise across healthcare and AWS, Leonardo helps customers translate requirements into technical solutions in the cloud.

Dr. Petty Chen

Dr. Petty Chen

Dr. Chen is the Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) electronic medical record (EMR) and hospital engagement lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She received her Master of Public Health (MPH) from Harvard University and her Doctor of Medicine (MD) from Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School. Working at the intersection between healthcare and tech, she is an experienced product leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-enabled software development and has worked closely with hospital leadership across Asia in innovation adoption.

Suyash Pandey

Suyash Pandey

Suyash Pandey is the engineering manager and solutions architect at BioMark. He led the development of BioMark’s systems for secure messaging, which were critical for high-speed turnaround COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) screening at Changi Airport. He also engineered and managed the Sanofi Patient Support Platform with over 12,000 diabetic and hypertensive patients in the Philippines and drove its expansion across Southeast Asia.