Bringing Digital Care and Patient Engagement to the Hospital with Buddy Healthcare

Buddy Healthcare, founded in Finland in 2016, was inspired partly by speaking with hospital staff about the difficulties that they face when communicating with patients. Staff reported spending significant amounts of time calling patients about appointments. Surgery patients sometimes received the wrong guidance on preparing for their procedures. Patients would go to unnecessary follow-up appointments after surgeries when they were not experiencing any symptoms that required attention and could have stayed at home.

Buddy Healthcare streamlines the traditional surgery pathway and automates manual, paper-heavy processes to help hospitals optimize waiting list management, save time for clinicians and patients, and improve pre- and postoperative processes. The Buddy Healthcare digital care coordination platform supports a web-based dashboard for clinicians and a user-friendly BuddyCare app for patients. The app helps patients complete electronic forms, submit readings or questionnaires from remote care devices, and send messages to their clinical teams. The dashboard helps clinicians review the information, respond to notifications, and communicate easily with patients in return. Patients have access to their care 24-7. This transparency reduces stress and anxiety before upcoming treatment and also supports patients in the recovery phase.

Buddy Healthcare has always used AWS services in some use cases, such as storage and content delivery. In fact, the company was one of the first Finnish companies to run servers on AWS. It eventually decided to migrate its coordinated-care solution to AWS. A major benefit to Buddy Healthcare, for example, of using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload—is that it is among the several HIPAA-eligible services that AWS offers.

Because of the sensitive nature of the data involved, Buddy Healthcare’s top priorities when choosing a web service for its solution were data protection, compliance, and security. AWS meets the requirements specified in Finland’s Criteria for Assessing the Information Security of Cloud Services (PiTuKri), and has implemented strong safeguards to help protect customer content. If Buddy Healthcare needs to make a change to remain in compliance with another country’s healthcare data standards, the company does not have to do any extra development in its code base. “AWS was the perfect fit for us when it came to data compliance and certification,” says Jukka Hassinen, chief technology officer and cofounder of Buddy Healthcare.

The next highest priority was scalability. Besides improving performance and building flexibility into the solution, scaling is vital to expanding Buddy Healthcare’s customer base. The company plans to expand throughout Finland and into other countries—and scaling is therefore a must. But Buddy Healthcare also offers its product for different medical specialties, meaning the solution is customized for different departments in the same hospital. The company’s software has use cases in 25 medical specializations and is deploying more use cases over time, so hospitals that try out the coordination solution in just one department will be able to quickly bring it into more departments later.

As for the product itself, Buddy Healthcare uses AWS to scale its performance automatically at the hospital level. “The solution just scales to the number of patients,” says Hassinen. “We don’t have to worry about our backend when the customer onboards, let’s say, 9,000 patients.” Even if an issue with the cloud service does arise, the system will automatically switch its cloud use to another nearby AWS Region.

Customers see other benefits immediately after implementing Buddy Healthcare’s solution, namely a reduction in the number of human-specific interactions needed for a patient’s care. Patients or doctors can schedule appointments without phone calls. Online forms are sent to patients automatically based on the care that they are receiving. Instead of going to extra follow-up appointments, patients can update their doctors by taking pictures of their surgery wounds and sending them over the app. Buddy Healthcare’s solution reduces patient phone calls by 98 percent and reduces no-shows and cancellations by 50 percent. Further, Buddy Healthcare estimates that using its service can save hospitals up to 73 USD per patient for care before an operation alone. As a result, hospitals save money while lightening the burden on staff who would otherwise have to perform the repetitive tasks of administration.

Using the coordination program also results in some less-obvious benefits for health systems. Because doctors can use it to remotely monitor patients before and after a procedure, hospital operating departments that use the Buddy Healthcare solution save patients an average of 2.5 hospital visits per elective procedure. Based on an estimated amount of carbon dioxide emitted each time a patient travels to a hospital, Buddy Healthcare estimates that if the United Kingdom’s National Health Service adopted its system for elective surgery patients, it could save more than 243,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

In 2016, Buddy Healthcare introduced its coordinated-care solution to Finland and has since expanded it to other countries. About 70 percent of Finland’s public sector hospitals use the solution, and the company has customers in seven other countries. And Buddy Healthcare has no plans to slow down.

“The world is much more ready for cloud services than it was 2 or 3 years ago,” says Markus Lind, vice president of product and business development at Buddy Healthcare. “And I hope it will stay the same and move forward. You can’t thrive in a future with digital health without using a cloud service.”