Dokotella Empowers Patients Through Digital Healthcare with AWS and Disraptor

Noticing issues with how doctors in South Africa arranged referrals to specialists, Dokotella developed a platform using AWS services to make the process more efficient, patient-centric, and compliant. Beta testing revealed scalability issues, so the company collaborated with AWS Partner Disraptor to enhance flexibility. Today, doctors, specialists, and patients use Dokotella to securely organize referrals together, resulting in 20 percent fewer missed appointments. Dokotella can easily scale its platform as user numbers rise, and it has improved application performance by 65 percent.

Startup Dokotella identified several weaknesses in how doctors in South Africa referred patients to specialists. They arranged referrals using email, phone calls, or messaging applications that didn’t comply with the country’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). This process excluded patients from scheduling, which Dokotella felt contributed to 20 percent missed appointments. What’s more, with no accepted channel to share feedback, specialists rarely communicated with doctors about the results of their treatments, limiting the opportunities for doctors to learn.

Dokotella used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop an all-in-one digital healthcare platform that doctors could rely on to manage referrals, include patients in the process, and gather feedback. During beta testing, however, the company discovered that doctors, specialists, and patients couldn’t quickly access data if user numbers suddenly increased. Georgie Erumeda Varughese, CEO of Dokotella, says, “We needed to improve the platform’s scalability to maintain its performance and security regardless of any rapid increases in the number of users.”

Working with AWS Partner Disraptor, Dokotella created a highly scalable, cloud-native AWS solution to deliver fast access to platform data. Using AWS expertise, Disraptor analyzed current platform pain points and optimized configurations according to AWS best practices. Malloron Nair, co-managing director of Disraptor, says, “We advised on decoupling the application and adopting flexible microservices platform-wide for greater scalability and security.”

Disraptor re-architected Dokotella’s platform using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, with AWS Fargate providing a serverless compute engine for running containers. The design also included Amazon Aurora Serverless, a database service that scales automatically based on an application’s needs. Disraptor included Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda for seamless updates, with Application Load Balancer to handle load balancing and enhance user experience. “Disraptor’s expertise in modernized AWS infrastructures came through during the engagement,” says Varughese. “With Disraptor’s support, we were completely confident that our cloud architecture was scalable, highly secure, compliant, and resilient—everything we needed it to be.”

Using Dokotella, doctors can schedule referrals in full compliance with POPIA, and, with patients at the center of the scheduling process, the number of missed appointments is 20 percent lower than the average. Additionally, specialists have a channel for safely sharing treatment results to help doctors learn and improve their patient care. “Doctors can schedule patient appointments and referrals, and patients can view their medical notes at any time of the day or night, thanks to our cloud-native AWS infrastructure,” comments Varughese. “Our platform gives patients greater involvement in their healthcare journeys, enhancing satisfaction.”

By decoupling the platform’s application with AWS microservices, Dokotella gained a more scalable platform and increased performance by 65 percent for faster data access. Tests also showed a 15 percent reduction in latency and a 32 percent cut in infrastructure costs through a move to containerization and AWS serverless services. Varughese adds, “We improved our security posture by 72 percent with AWS microservices, ensuring full compliance with South Africa's stringent Protection of Personal Information Act regulations.”

Using the platform’s increased flexibility, Dokotella launched a pilot program for one of South Africa’s leading healthcare groups in November 2024. “Our first thoughts were that it would take six weeks to get the pilot up and running, but through infrastructure as code on AWS, we did it in just 4 weeks,” says Varughese. The pilot, running at an emergency center in Cape Town, supports doctors dealing with patients who suffer work-related injuries. They use Dokotella to manage patient referrals to one of the city’s leading rehabilitation clinics. Varughese says, “Doctors referr patients to specialists at the clinic via our platform rather than through messaging applications like WhatsApp, making the process both efficient and compliant.”

Launched in 2024, Dokotella offers a healthcare technology platform that creates a highly secure digital ecosystem that keeps patients at the center. Its unifying Dokotella platform helps improve practice management, providing storage and access to patient-related data through an all-in-one-box solution that’s reliable and compliant with the latest regulations on personal data in South Africa.