Creating an Extensible Virtual Healthcare Service Using AWS for Amazon Clinic

Amazon Clinic is simple to use. To get started, patients specify their conditions and then choose from a list of licensed and qualified telehealth providers. Next, they complete a short intake questionnaire. Patients and third-party clinicians then directly connect through a message-based or videoconference portal with advanced security features. After the consultation, the clinician sends a personalized treatment plan using the portal, including any necessary prescriptions, to the patient’s preferred pharmacy.

Amazon Clinic uses HIPAA-eligible AWS services to safeguard PHI. That way, the development team can focus on the core customer experience instead of spending time managing and maintaining infrastructure. “Security, reliability, and extensibility are very important for us,” says Avinash Jaisinghani, senior manager of software development at Amazon Clinic. “We chose AWS because it fits very nicely with those three pillars.”

By building on AWS, Amazon Clinic was able to simply discover and add services that would solve business issues as it evolved very quickly. “A great thing about AWS services is that they’re very composable,” says Jaisinghani. “What we are seeing as we adopt more AWS services is that they fit together well because their interfaces are flexible enough for us to fit them in as our needs grow.”

Amazon Clinic uses AWS services for compute, storage, and communication. For compute, Amazon Clinic uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service used to run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), which runs highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers. When building its solution, the Amazon Clinic team benefited from AWS resilience and consistency, knowing that the APIs it relies on would not change abruptly. This made AWS a great fit for Amazon Clinic.

In terms of storage, Amazon Clinic uses Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at nearly any scale. This service has out-of-the-box security built in, so Amazon Clinic can work toward HIPAA compliance and PHI best practices with very little customization. Using AWS, Amazon Clinic can also optimize costs by paying only for the customer usage that its solution attracts. “What really helps is the pay-as-you-go model,” says Jaisinghani. “With the right design, Amazon DynamoDB is a very cost-effective solution.”

For asynchronous communication between patients and clinicians, Amazon Clinic uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), a fully managed Pub/Sub service for multiplexed messaging. With Amazon SNS, patients can message clinicians with questions about health and treatment plans from any device with an Amazon app. For its synchronous video communication, Amazon Clinic uses Amazon Chime SDK. The videoconference portion of the Amazon Clinic’s solution was launched 50 percent faster using Amazon Chime SDK compared with other solutions.

The benefits of Amazon Clinic are also evident for clinicians and patients. The solution was built with clinician experience front and center. “For a clinician, working on Amazon Clinic is the same as working with their other virtual-care patients,” says Nworah Ayogu, general manager and chief medical officer at Amazon Clinic. “We have built a seamless experience for clinicians, and that matters a lot.”

For patients, Amazon Clinic meets convenience, price, and selection needs. “With Amazon Clinic, it was incredibly easy and convenient to get my thyroid medication refilled. No hidden fees, no in-person visits. For someone without health insurance, the cost was my favorite part,” says Catherine M., an Amazon Clinic customer. For some providers through Amazon Clinic, patients wait as few as 15 minutes to meet with a clinician, and the speed of the service resonates with patients. “I woke up with pink eye and had prescription eye drops called in to my pharmacy within 15 minutes. I had the eye drops in hand 2 hours after I woke up,” says Shannon R., an Amazon Clinic customer.

Amazon Clinic has achieved customer satisfaction of more than 95 percent consistently since its launch. “We know we’ve built something that customers love, and there is no substitute for that,” says Jaisinghani.