Delivering modern, accessible virtual healthcare solutions with the cloud

Delivering modern, accessible virtual healthcare solutions, such as telemedicine, with the cloud is a rapidly expanding area of healthcare in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to CNBC.

Telehealth solutions make virtual, real-time interactions between patient and provider possible. These solutions can be beneficial for both patients and care providers, letting patients receive care without having to step into a doctor’s office—a key feature that has benefits for those in hard-to-reach or rural areas and patients with mobility issues. Additionally, these solutions can help reduce physical traffic in hospitals, which is imperative during the pandemic.

Customers around the globe share how building on Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps them scale, innovate, and operate at scale to improve the patient and care provider experience.

Doctor Anywhere improves accessibility and reliability for patients

Doctor Anywhere is a Singapore-based telehealth platform serving more than one million online and offline users in Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. Directly from the Doctor Anywhere app, patients can video call a licensed doctor on demand and receive medical advice within minutes. They can also have prescribed medication delivered a few hours later and schedule in-home visits for procedures such as blood tests, receiving a flu vaccine, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy. Users can access their healthcare information, including health screening reports and consultation history, all in one place within the app.

Rishik Bahri, chief technology officer of Doctor Anywhere says, “Since the start of the pandemic, we have experienced a three to four-fold increase demand for our services. When serving patients’ critical health needs, we cannot afford to have downtime. Reliability is essential to earning patient trust. We dynamically respond to millions of patient requests a month.”

Global availability is a top priority for providing a seamless patient experience with their service. “Using AWS services, including security tools, has helped us manage patient data securely. The high reliability and low latency provided by the AWS Regions helps Doctor Anywhere to deliver a better patient experience, and automate our service delivery so it is simpler to manage for our IT team,” notes Bahri.

Halodoc scales to serve millions of customers

Halodoc, a leading healthcare tech startup from Indonesia provides tele-consultations with healthcare professionals, pharmaceuticals delivery in more than 30 cities across Indonesia, and provides in-home lab services by qualified professionals, all through its mobile app.

Abhilash Ramakrishna, the chief technology officer and head of engineering and design at Halodoc, says, “AWS lets us serve thousands of patients when they need us the most, without worrying about downtime or over-provisioning our IT infrastructure to handle larger patient loads. With AWS, we can scale on demand to support patients’ access to our services. We feel confident that patients will be taken care of.”

With the ability to quickly test and deploy new ideas, Halodoc is better able to serve their customers, “We are able to serve millions of customers and thousands of our partners around-the-clock. This level of availability would not have been possible without the cloud. AWS helps us to improve the overall service quality for our customers.”

Continually improving and iterating on their services, Abhilash says AWS helps Halodoc innovate on behalf of its customers. The Halodoc team frequently updates and releases new services, “Through the ease of extensive monitoring and deployment automation, we are able to seamlessly manage and monitor multiple releases for 40+ microservices throughout the week, without any disruptions.”

Nye Health gains agility and flexibility with the cloud

Nye Health in the UK built a scalable desktop and mobile-based NHS-compliant platform that allows all NHS staff including general practitioners (GP), hospital doctors, nurses, physios, and clerical staff in the UK to offer consultations to patients via video or phone call from any device, anywhere.

Using AWS, Nye Health has the flexibility to scale its business quickly and easily and in a secure way to meet the increased demand from clinicians and patients during the COVID-19 crisis. Nye Health’s telephone and video call system is fully encrypted and compliant with NHS Digital standards. The platform currently covers more than 10 million patients and is growing by as much as 150 percent a week, servicing thousands of patient consultations each week.

MedStar Health delivers integrated virtual and in-person care

MedStar Health (MedStar), a US-based nonprofit healthcare organization, operates more than 120 entities, including ten hospitals in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia metropolitan area. In February 2020, before COVID-19 fully hit the east coast of the US, MedStar provided around 240 direct-to-patient telehealth interactions. This number spiked in mid-March 2020, when on-demand and scheduled visits rose in numbers due to the pandemic. Between mid-March and the first week of June, MedStar had more than 200,000 telehealth sessions across all services. To support this growth, MedStar turned to the cloud.

Using Amazon Connect, MedStar was able to scale quickly to provide timely lab result information to patients. MedStar relies on the cloud to provide continuity of care, allowing patient data to flow through back-end systems, whether the services were delivered in-person or virtually, something Dr. Ethan Booker, emergency physician and medical director of the MedStar Telehealth Innovation Center and MedStar eVisit, calls “wraparound health services.”

To hear more from Dr. Booker check out his Fix This podcast interview.

Doctor Raksa keeps patient data secure

Doctor Raksa Co., Ltd. (Doctor Raksa), a digital healthcare startup in Thailand, provides patients with access to doctors and pharmacies 24/7 through the Raksa patient apps. Patients can consult any of the 800 specialist doctors on the Doctor Raksa platform within minutes and get an online prescription and drugs sent to their home within one hour.

To provide a seamless and secure patient experience, Doctor Raksa integrates with more than 100 hospitals, insurance providers, and pharmacies across Thailand. One Doctor Raska patient noted in an app review: “Very fast and convenient. Raksa saved me from having to make many trips to the hospital. I had breathing difficulties in the middle of the night and was happy to receive consultations and prescription from a doctor through the application.” Information gathered during a telehealth consultation can also seamlessly integrate with a patient’s in-person consultation records from previous visits.

Doctor Raksa’s development team built a secure and reactive microservices architecture using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Kinesis to run Kubernetes and collect, process, and analyze video and data streams in real time. Amazon Aurora is the OLTP/OLAP data storage layer for system resilience and data reliability. By improving reliability, the team can prevent downtime, which affects patient confidence and lowers the chance of patients returning to use the service.

Jaren Siew is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Doctor Raksa. “Building our infrastructure on AWS lets us focus more on building functionality of our services instead of maintaining infrastructure, which translates into a better patient experience overall,” says Siew.

Our customers continue to innovate on behalf of patients, healthcare professionals, and insurance providers by building reliable, patient-centric solutions in the AWS Cloud.

To learn more, download our latest AWS healthcare eBooks. Meet the AWS customers who are driving innovation and transformation in healthcare with the cloud in the eBook, “The Future of healthcare in the cloud.” And visualize clinical healthcare innovation and the future of personalized experiences in the cloud in the eBook “Redefining healthcare in the cloud.”