Samitivej Hospital Group Builds Healthcare App at 35% Less Cost with AWS Partner DailiTech

Digital Health Venture (DHV) is part of the Samitivej Hospital Group, a private healthcare provider with hospitals and health centers in Bangkok, Thailand. The group launched its Wellness Tech strategy in 2020 for greater personalized healthcare. With the support of DHV, it developed Samitivej Plus, a digital healthcare platform for patients to make appointments and access their medical history online, and Samitivej PACE, an online system that provides relatives access to a patient’s surgery status in real time.

In 2022, the group looked to develop a mobile app that empowers patients to take better control of their health. Using the app, users record their health habits and proactively manage their well-being. DHV sought to build the mobile app on a cloud-native platform for rapid development and easy scaling to support tens of thousands of downloads. After considering several cloud providers, DHV chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Explains Panuchart Bunyakiati, chief technology officer at Digital Health Venture, “We saw AWS as the most innovative provider on the market to run and optimize our mobile solution.”

To accelerate development, DHV chose to outsource the design and deployment of the AWS infrastructure to experts and focus on software development. “We needed to work with a professional team that had in-depth knowledge of AWS and could help us build and develop our platform over time,” says Bunyakiati.

AWS connected DHV with Bangkok-based DailiTech, a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN) and an AWS Consulting Partner. The company has more than 20 AWS certifications and specializes in mobile application development services. “AWS recommended DailiTech due to its customer-centric approach and commitment to cost-effective app design,” says Bunyakiati.

DailiTech adopted the AWS Well-Architected Framework, implementing best practices for a secure, reliable, efficient, and cost-effective architecture. It also uses a microservices approach to enhance platform scalability and facilitate a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, ensuring DHV developers achieve quicker time-to-market for their app software.

The mobile app, called “Well by Samitivej,” runs on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)—a fully managed container orchestration service—to administer and scale containerized applications, and cloud-native Amazon Aurora for database services. Well also uses Amazon Cognito to administer sign-up and sign-in features.

By collaborating with DailiTech, DHV successfully launched the app in November 2022. “DailiTech is well versed in AWS, so we didn’t lose time figuring out the most cost-effective and scalable solutions for our project,” says Bunyakiati.

As a result of time savings and its optimized AWS architecture, DHV estimates it reduced operational costs by 35 percent. Furthermore, its CI/CD pipeline can roll out software iterations in minutes. “Without our CI/CD pipeline, it would take us a couple of days to deploy from testing to our production environment,” states Bunyakiati.

Patients at Samitivej hospitals and community members are using the Well app to foster healthier eating and exercise habits. An especially popular feature has been a mood-tracking feature that helps users monitor their daily emotional well-being and mental health.

Upon registering their information in the app, patients gain access to exercise and diet plans tailored to their unique medical needs—all facilitated through integrations between the AWS infrastructure and the hospital group's on-premises patient database. The app also helps patients schedule clinical appointments and engage in video consultations, and, in collaboration with the hospital group, it connects them with a nationwide pharmacy service to facilitate home delivery of medications.

The DHV team continues to explore opportunities to enhance the Well app on AWS, further evolving the app's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities so that patients can adopt a personalized health program that merges clinical expertise with AI technology to predict their risk of serious illnesses. The team is keen to introduce explainable AI models to enhance the app's predictive capabilities, giving clinicians better support with transparent metrics.

To learn more, visit  Modern Applications on AWS