Orion Health Reduces Hospital Costs, Patient Stress Using Customer Engagement Solution Built on AWS

To make data collection simpler for patients and healthcare providers alike, AWS Partner Orion Health developed a digital customer engagement solution called Digital Front Door. This user-friendly tool is browser and device agnostic. “It’s quick and simple for the patient to go tap, tap, tap from the comfort of their sofa,” says Anne O’Hanlon, Orion Health’s product director. “The overall goal is to make the process of being admitted to hospital much less stressful for the patient.” 

The Digital Front Door runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. For the backend database, the system uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which simplifies the setup, operation, and scalability of a relational database in the cloud. When designing the solution, Orion Health documented real-life use cases shared by doctors and nurses and engaged pilot users from a variety of specialties. The result is a solution that has the flexibility needed for diverse healthcare providers and that can handle edge cases, such as situations in which a patient doesn’t have an email address or needs an interpreter to fill out forms. “We had to build the product to cater for these scenarios,” says O’Hanlon. “And we used test-driven development to validate that we’d addressed them.” 

Orion Health monitors its AWS resources and applications using Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service built for engineers, developers, and information technology managers. And for security, it uses AWS Secrets Manager, which helps companies protect database credentials, API keys, and other secrets needed to access applications, services, and information technology resources. For ease of use, the staff can access patient-contributed data with two-factor authentication rather than requiring the use of a virtual private network.

On AWS, Orion Health is able to securely and economically scale Digital Front Door to meet the needs of customers caring for millions of individuals. “If the analytics are showing us that demand is higher than we’d anticipated, we can rely on AWS to automatically adjust server resources,” says O’Hanlon. The company is also able to help healthcare organizations reduce costs. 

Orion Health plans to continue developing Digital Front Door and its other healthcare solutions, making the most of doing so on AWS. “Less time spent on infrastructure means more time developing product features,” O’Hanlon says. “Ultimately this means that we can innovate faster to make life more convenient for patients.”