AlteaCare Provides Digital Gateway to Hospitals with App Built on AWS

Telemedicine is hailed as a viable solution to capacity constraints in Indonesia’s healthcare sector. Indonesia currently has 1.2 hospital beds per 1,000 people, a figure lower than nearly all its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. The use of telemedicine promotes safe social distancing, early diagnosis, and treatment of ailments. It also provides more efficient patient throughput in hospitals, particularly in cities like Jakarta, where traffic congestion limits mobility.

AlteaCare is a holistic healthcare app that connects patients with doctors from hospitals through live video chats. Launched in September 2021, AlteaCare currently partners with 17 hospitals and more than 100,000 users have downloaded the app. William Suryawan, chief operations officer and cofounder of AlteaCare, says, “Our mission is to become the digital gateway between hospitals and patients, especially those who struggle to access health services in person.”

When patients book a consultation through AlteaCare, they’re connected with a medical advisor who guides them to the right specialist or lab service based on their needs. A patient relations officer then engages with patients post-consultation to ensure their healthcare needs are met.  

AlteaCare built its app on Amazon Web Services (AWS) due to the impressive technical support, including subsidized training for startups. As a healthtech startup with limited resources, cost control was important, alongside security. “AWS provides cost-efficient infrastructure solutions while ensuring our app follows security best practices,” Suryawan says.

Together with AWS solution architects and Sprout, an AWS Partner, AlteaCare conducted an AWS Well Architected review focused on security. The business uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor its applications and optimize resource utilization, and AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall to protect against common web exploits. Encryption of data at rest and in transit are among the security best practices deployed to prevent leaks of private healthcare information.  

Before launching the AlteaCare app, the company built a separate app called Altea Loyalty using monolithic architecture on AWS and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). This allowed AlteaCare to learn more about its target audience before launching its primary app and let developers experiment on the AWS platform.

In addition, through various workshops and consultation with AWS, AlteaCare’s IT team discovered how a serverless architecture with microservices offered multiple benefits over traditional monolithic infrastructure. A serverless approach hasn’t only reduced costs for AlteaCare with on-demand infrastructure, but also shortened the app’s time-to-market, a valuable metric in the fast-paced healthtech industry.

The startup estimated it’d take three months to launch the AlteaCare app using virtual servers in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). But with a serverless model including automated deployment, it could go to market in just one month. “Our team could concentrate on writing and optimizing code instead of thinking about the type of servers they needed and how to scale up,” Suryawan says. The startup currently maintains a hybrid monolithic/microservices architecture, assessing best-fit infrastructure for each new workload based on its requirements.

The AlteaCare app uses Amazon DynamoDB as a fully managed serverless database with AWS Lambda serverless compute to autoscale. This approach offers cost-effective scaling, particularly during peak periods or directly after a user launches the app.

Containerization has also helped control costs in the AlteaCare app. The startup uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for container orchestration and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store patient data. Compared to the cost of setting up a dedicated server on Amazon EC2, AlteaCare is saving 30 percent with the combination of serverless deployment and containerized applications.

With managed services such as Amazon EKS and Amazon DynamoDB, in addition to AWS solution architects support, AlteaCare requires fewer human resources to set up and run its AWS Cloud infrastructure. It has 15 developers on staff and just one employee looking after IT infrastructure. “With the support of AWS solution architects, and range of modern application services on AWS, we can maximize efficiency with reduced time and effort to expand our market offering,” Suryawan says.  

Expansion is next on AlteaCare’s agenda. The app has experienced double-digit monthly growth since launch, and the startup anticipates a similar level of growth as it completes its first year of operation in 2022. Its teams are working to increase the number of hospital partners from 17 to 30, and are also developing a foundation for analytics with a data lake in Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS.

Analytics use cases include investigation into complaints reported at its partner hospitals, to determine underlying issues and prevent recurrence of common problems. AlteaCare also plans to develop analytics dashboards to gain a deeper understanding of technological issues that can drive up latency during users’ video calls with practitioners. The startup is considering leveraging the newly launched AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region as a potential means to ensure low-latency video calls for app users.

From improved access to payment gateways and a smoother experience buying prescription drugs, AlteaCare aims to digitize all patient touchpoints. “By continually optimizing our app on AWS, we have an opportunity to improve patient interactions with hospitals and ultimately, provide a better patient experience,” Suryawan says.

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/business-applications/