The Evercare Group moves to Oracle APEX and OCI to spark healthcare innovation

Research published by The World Health Organization in 2019 found that, without intervention, up to 5 billion people will be unable to access healthcare by 2030. The more than 11,000 associates of the Pakistan-based Evercare Group believe that every person on the planet has a fundamental right to accessible healthcare. Accordingly, the organization is disrupting traditional healthcare models by offering an integrated cross-continent healthcare services platform in emerging markets. Evercare operates 30 hospitals, 16 clinics, and 82 diagnostics centers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Nigeria.

In years past, Evercare’s IT staff operated an on-premises data center. But day to day activities were hindered either by manual processes or the absence of operational systems. The patient journey within facilities was not well mapped out, and often access to important data such as medical records was delayed or unavailable.

Data volumes were growing rapidly, straining the existing infrastructure and creating high latency for users. Additionally, this growth in data highlighted the need for stronger information security and disaster recovery measures. Simultaneously, the organization needed to remain compliant with regulations across multiple countries.

Evercare evaluated solutions from various technology providers, with each offering demonstrations and proposals. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle APEX were selected as the best choice in terms of cost, performance, and support.

OCI provides fast, flexible, and affordable compute capacity, and its public cloud regions are the fastest-growing network of global data centers across continents. These data centers provide secure, high-performance in local environments, which Evercare could use to help ensure regional compliance and business continuity in each country.

Oracle APEX, a fully managed, low-code application development platform for building and deploying data-driven applications, drew Evercare’s attention because it was being adopted rapidly by other organizations within Pakistan, including other hospitals. Oracle APEX would allow for fast development of scalable and secure enterprise apps for Evercare.

With the support of Oracle’s local team, the implementation of Oracle APEX went smoothly, and Evercare’s technical staff quickly learned to use the platform’s capabilities to rapidly develop applications. Projects that previously took as long as three months to complete are now finished in as little as two days with APEX.

All the workloads at the hospital migrated to OCI and all healthcare facilities connected to the cloud platform using site-to-site IPSec VPN connections. After migrating workloads from its on-premises data center to OCI, Evercare now sees 99.99% system uptime to support its 24/7 operations. At the same time, security was strengthened and disaster recovery processes were established and documented.

To date, the success of these projects has been measured by the organization’s most important stakeholders—staff on the front lines. Feedback from doctors, nurses, and facilities staff has been overwhelmingly positive, despite the significant cultural change stemming from the adoption of new technologies and applications.

For example, before adopting OCI, when doctors saw  patients, they would consult printed documents and make notes in the margins. The documents would then be placed in a folder and stored in a file cabinet. Today, a doctor has access to systems of record, developed in APEX and delivered via OCI, on a desktop or tablet. Annotations are captured within the applications and stored securely in OCI.

Patients also experience the benefits of a smoother experience. For example, if a patient is still waiting 30 minutes after checking in for an appointment, employees receive a notification to reassure the patient. Evercare can expedite, track, and analyze patients’ journeys, from when they check in all the way through treatment and follow up. When connectivity to systems is interrupted due to local outages, data can still be gathered and uploaded to OCI when connectivity is restored. With increased efficiencies, hospital staff can see more patients each day and make more informed decisions based on accurate data.

Evercare partnered with Techaccess Pakistan for the implementation.