Brazil’s SpinCare Expands Healthcare App Customer Base with Dati and AWS

SpinCare, a startup that provides management software for home healthcare providers and caregivers across Brazil, turned to AWS Partner Dati to update its application running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), resulting in a 40 percent improvement in performance. Working with Dati, it migrated from its existing cloud platform to AWS in just 2 months, and implemented services that include AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon EC2 Instances. With its new infrastructure, SpinCare has reduced costs, grown from 30 customers to 150 with a total of 20,000 patients, and plans to expand globally.

SpinCare, founded in 2019, is a fast-growing startup based in Blumenau, Brazil, that provides an app and web-based software for home healthcare companies and caregivers to older people. The cloud platform it used to host its application created technical issues for end users and required a lot of troubleshooting by SpinCare’s IT team. These issues made it hard for the company to grow. SpinCare selected Brazil-based AWS Partner Dati to develop and implement a better solution.

Impressed by Dati’s experience with software as a service (SaaS) and independent software vendors (ISVs), SpinCare asked it to help the company migrate to AWS. Dati also participates in the AWS Think Big for Small Business program, which provides expedited access to AWS Partner programs, financial incentives, and support for maximizing business growth with AWS and end customers. César Griebeler, vice president of technology for Pulsati Group—which includes SpinCare—says Dati was also appealing because of its nearby location. “It was very important to have this close contact,” he says. “And Dati’s short-term, mid-term, and long-term vision for us was important when we talked about our cloud journey.”

So in early 2022, Dati began assessing SpinCare’s technology and business needs with an eye toward helping the company migrate its cloud infrastructure to AWS and fine-tune its IT architecture. SpinCare also wanted a cloud solution that would help keep costs under control as it grew.

Speaking with people in different roles across SpinCare, Dati discovered that the company’s customers experienced regular problems logging in to the user interface and generating the reports they needed to improve healthcare services. SpinCare’s customers depend on the website and app to capture information about healthcare visits to patients, manage scheduling, monitor care plans, and automate billing.

Over the next 2 months, Dati worked with SpinCare to build a migration plan that would deliver the performance improvements that customers were looking for. This involved using AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy and scale web applications, Elastic Load Balancing to distribute network traffic to improve application scalability, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. During the migration, Dati and SpinCare made some adjustments to the original plan—in some cases, recoding or refactoring software to provide better results than a straight lift-and-shift transfer would have provided—but they met the plan’s milestones on time and completed the migration in March 2022.

Dati also used Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to provide a significant discount compared to on-demand pricing. And it suggested that SpinCare follow up the migration with an AWS Well-Architected review to further fine-tune how the cloud architecture could keep up with customer needs and support growth.

SpinCare’s customers were quick to notice the difference in performance after the migration was completed, even before the AWS Well-Architected review got under way. “Customer feedback was really, really nice,” says Griebeler. Customers were contacting the company with comments like, “What happened? Reports are running at their best performance. The system is running very well, and we don’t have the kinds of issues we’d been having anymore.”

Within a few months of completing the migration, SpinCare had numbers to back up what customers were reporting: performance had improved by 40 percent and total monthly costs had dropped by around 20 percent. The infrastructure improvements, including automatic scaling and improved security, make it easier to add new customers—and potential clients are impressed when SpinCare notes that its foundation is on AWS. Before migration, SpinCare served around 150 customers. Today, it serves a customer base with around 20,000 patients, including a new customer that provides healthcare support to 4,000 patients—even as its infrastructure costs remain the same as before the migration. “When we say ‘AWS’ and when we say we have a service provider working close to us, it’s easy to move forward,” says Griebeler. “It’s easy to win when we talk about AWS.”

The infrastructure improvements have also eliminated many of the support issues and bugs that SpinCare’s IT team previously dealt with. Now, instead of spending 70 percent of their time on troubleshooting and 30 percent on application enhancements, those numbers are reversed: the team can focus most of its effort on improving SpinCare’s software features and capabilities. And Dati continues to work with SpinCare to keep fine-tuning the company’s IT processes and technology. All of this is helping the company to expand, with plans now underway to begin operations in Portugal. Eventually, other parts of Europe and the US market are also in SpinCare’s sights.