Lira Medika Migrates to AWS to Manage an Increase in Patient Data and Healthcare Technology Adoption

During the 2020–2021 lockdowns, healthcare technology adoption in Indonesia rose to 300 percent. Telemedicine and health-oriented mobile apps are making it more convenient for patients to access clinical care. Lira Medika is a private hospital in Indonesia’s West Java province that’s using technology to improve patient experiences. With 560 employees and 24 clinical specialties, it was the first hospital in the area offering an app allowing patients to book appointments directly.

Lira Medika is committed to providing patient-centered care and becoming the leading hospital in the West Java region through patient referrals. The hospital grew 25 percent from 2019 to 2021 and has ambitious plans for expansion.

Lika Medika belongs to the Pundi Raya Niaga conglomerate in Indonesia. Until mid-2021, the hospital—like all businesses in the Pundi Raya Niaga group—was using on-premises servers for its primary and data recovery infrastructure.

However, as the business grew, it faced storage capacity issues. Its main server stored 3 TB of information, most of which came from large x-ray files and images from picture archiving communication systems (PACS). Existing servers were reaching capacity at this level, but Lira Medika projects sustained growth, particularly over the next five years. The lead time for ordering and installing new servers was more than one month, and aging hardware had caused up to 6 hours downtime on its main server and database. Moreover, the hospital needed faster, more reliable infrastructure as its customer base and reliance on technology rose.

In July 2021, Lira Medika began migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It chose AWS because of the platform’s reputation for stability, range of products and services, and the support received from its AWS account team. Lira Medika worked with AWS Partner, PT Central Data Technology (CDT), to achieve an efficient, secure migration from its data center.

As a first step, CDT performed a security assessment of Lira Medika’s IT environment. This produced recommendations as to which AWS services and best practices would ensure compliance with data privacy guidelines, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Moch Firmansyah, head of information technology at Pundi Raya Niaga, says, “AWS provides excellent native security tools, and CDT advised us on how to properly implement encryption and access roles on the AWS Cloud.” Lira Medika is using AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall to protect against common web exploits and AWS CloudTrail to track user access logs. In one incident, the business used AWS CloudTrail to uncover a security gap that had caused nearly 2 hours of downtime.

The use of Application Load Balancer also helps maintain stability and direct traffic to Lira Medika’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server instances. Since migrating to AWS, Lira Medika has maintained 99.8 percent uptime, a critical success factor in the healthcare industry.

In addition to stability, availability has improved with the migration of Lira Medika’s main SQL database to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with multi-availability zone architecture. “Backup and failover happen in near real-time, contributing to a database performance improvement of 20 percent versus on-premises servers,” Firmansyah shares. Lira Medika uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to back up its database and as a content delivery network to serve static web assets from its main hospital information system.

Internal users such as staff members, alongside external customers, have reacted positively to the changes experienced since the AWS migration. “We’ve received user feedback that our systems have improved, mainly because they’re faster and more stable,” Firmansyah says. “We can sleep better at night with automated scaling and backups. This prevents the downtime issues we had in the past and helps maintain Lira Medika’s reputation for quality.”

When Lira Medika was running on-premises servers, its IT team had to manually perform database backups and monitor their status every day. They also had to physically check server health each month and regularly monitor electricity supply and temperature in the server rooms. Firmansyah estimates the team is saving 1–2 hours’ manual work each day since migrating to AWS.

Lira Medika plans to build five new hospitals in West Java in the next few years to expand on its vision of patient-centric care. “We plan to use AWS infrastructure from the outset in our new hospitals, and we’re also considering the AWS Cloud for other divisions of Pundi Raya,” says Firmansyah. Lira Medika also plans to implement SAP on AWS to connect its growing hospital network and promote data sharing across locations.

Currently, Lira Medika’s IT team is working with CDT on the second phase of its cloud migration project. Together, they’re moving the hospital’s Windows Active Directory workloads—the core application supporting connected medical equipment—to Amazon EC2. They’re also migrating from the AWS Asia (Singapore) Region to the newly launched AWS Asia (Jakarta) Region.

To learn more, visit Migrate with AWS