CareMonitor Scales Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring Platform with AWS

The patient care journey is traditionally a fragmented one, especially for more complex cases or chronic conditions that involve multiple healthcare providers and clinical specialists. As a result, a patient’s critical health data may be stored and siloed across disparate IT systems or in outdated pen-and-paper systems.

In 2018, Australian healthtech startup CareMonitor was founded to solve this challenge. Born on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, CareMonitor is transforming the healthcare space with its unified platform for health management, which collects and consolidates data from clinical management systems, medical devices, and patients in real time into a single view and protects it with modern encryption standards. It also provides intelligent healthcare, with built-in risk stratification tools, care plan templates, continuous monitoring of vitals, smart algorithms, and data analytics. In June 2020, the platform was recognized as one of the winners of the Innovation Challenge championing digital health innovation, led by the Australian Digital Health Agency.

From the beginning, it was clear to Dinesh Reddy, chief technology officer at CareMonitor, that the company needed a cloud-based platform to provide accessibility and scalability in any location or on any device. “Can our developers get on board easily without having to sit through many hours of tutorials? Can we effectively protect the privacy and security of patient data and maintain compliance with data regulations? These were some of the questions we asked when evaluating the platform on which to build CareMonitor,” Reddy explains.

Ultimately, AWS checked all the boxes and stood out from the rest of the pack. The range of services offered by AWS under one cohesive cloud platform exceeded the startup’s expectations, from SDKs and programming toolkits to encryption standards to strong customer support.

One of the headline features of CareMonitor is its telehealth platform, a highly popular video-conferencing solution that connects healthcare providers with patients to offer remote consultations—whether in one-on-one sessions or in conferences of up to 100 people.

Telehealth is built on the Amazon Chime SDK, which developers can use to quickly add audio calling, video calling, and screen-sharing capabilities to web or mobile applications. Deepak Biswal, founder and chief executive officer of CareMonitor, says, “The Amazon Chime SDK stood out immediately with its extensive documentation, which helped us get the feature up and running in just two weeks. Any technical issues that cropped up subsequently were quickly addressed by the brilliant team at AWS, who were always on hand to help, despite us being a small startup.”

Furthermore, doctors can take advantage of Amazon Transcribe Medical to quickly generate accurate transcriptions from medical consultations between patients and physicians. This niche service uses machine learning to provide highly accurate automatic speech recognition for the medical industry, including medical and pharmacological terms.

Today, CareMonitor’s telehealth platform serves over 10,000 patients across multiple healthcare institutions, including hospitals, health insurers, GP clinics, and specialists.

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic placed extraordinary stress on many national healthcare systems. An expansion of telehealth services encouraged by the Australian government led to a sharp increase in demand for CareMonitor’s solutions virtually overnight.
“Everyone was scrambling to get a solution in place, and we were bracing for a spike in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases,” Biswal remarks. “Beyond telehealth, we had the same fear as everyone: What happens when we are overrun by demand for hospital beds, ventilators, and so on?”

With Amazon API Gateway, CareMonitor rose to the challenge. In the span of just one week, the company implemented a new dashboard specifically for COVID-19 patients on its telehealth and remote patient monitoring platform and developed an entire workflow to automate the processing of these patients, from admission to continuous remote monitoring to discharge. Reddy says. “Amazon API Gateway was a perfect fit for our continuous deployment and integration strategy from the beginning, and we could deploy microservices without any disruption to our existing platform.”

Thanks to these efforts, CareMonitor could position itself at the heart of Australia’s COVID-19 response. The startup collaborated with the Western Sydney Primary Health Network and the Western Sydney Local Health District to set up the first-ever, citywide, remote monitoring solution for COVID-19 patients in record time, bringing relief to overburdened hospitals.

CareMonitor has begun to experiment with Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine learning models using the data on its platform to provide health insights, optimize clinical decision-making tools, and fine-tune its predictive risk algorithms.

“With the huge amount of data we are capturing in every patient interaction, we are as much a data company as we are a provider of health management software,” Biswal says. “So far, we have focused on building the foundation of our platform, but soon we will be taking a leap into using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help our customers and their patients glean more valuable insights from their data.

The pandemic has accelerated CareMonitor’s international expansion plans, with doctors and nurses as far as North America and Africa showing interest in its telehealth and remote patient monitoring platform. Biswal and Reddy are certain of navigating these new opportunities without sacrificing time or quality for existing customers thanks to the AWS Global Infrastructure.

“Everyone is rightfully careful and conservative when it comes to health data, so the ability to host data locally and securely is of tremendous importance to our customers,” says Reddy. Looking ahead, CareMonitor continues to grow with the confidence that AWS can keep up with its speed. “We feel assured knowing that AWS offers multiple Availability Zones and the low latency for us to rapidly deploy in other regions.”