Case Study
Case Study: Providing Virtual Care Access for the U.S. Coast Guard with Hiive Health and AWS
Friday, February 14, 2025
4 min read
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) faced a critical challenge: how to deliver reliable, secure healthcare to more than 87,000 active service members across diverse and often remote locations. To address this, the USCG launched its Coast Guard Care Anywhere telehealth initiative in October 2020, powered by the Hiive Health (formerly ViiMed) enterprise virtual care platform.
Challenge
The USCG needed a solution that could:
Deliver remote care across diverse populations
Ensure HIPAA- and FedRAMP-aligned security
Deploy rapidly with minimal infrastructure overhead
Simplify the experience for both providers and patients
Maintain resiliency and scalability during crisis conditions
Healthcare providers and patients were geographically dispersed and operating in environments where traditional in-person care was not feasible.
Solution: A Scalable, Serverless Virtual Care Ecosystem
Hiive Health, in partnership with AWS, deployed a secure, cloud-native virtual care platform hosted on AWS GovCloud (US) using a serverless architecture. This allowed the USCG to stand up a nationwide telehealth capability rapidly, securely, and with long-term cost efficiency.
Key AWS services powering the platform included:
Amazon Chime (secure video consultations)
Amazon RDS, Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS (data processing, storage, notifications)
Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, AWS WAF (monitoring, management, security)
Hiive Health plans to integrate additional AWS tools like Amazon Aurora Serverless, Amazon HealthLake, and Amazon Transcribe to further enhance its platform capabilities.
Implementation
Under prime contractor MicroHealth, Hiive Health and its partners deployed the platform in less than 10 days from contract award on September 18 to launch on October 6, 2020, despite COVID-19 restrictions that prevented onsite work. The platform was launched with a conditional authority to operate (ATO), allowing providers to begin using the system immediately.
To support remote deployment, Hiive Health embedded a guided training experience directly into the platform, allowing healthcare professionals to learn the tool as they actively navigated real care workflows.
Key Features and Capabilities
Rapidly route patients to the most appropriate provider regardless of location
Configure workflows to support various care models including behavioral health, chronic care, musculoskeletal, and urgent care
Integrates scheduling, video, screen sharing, and secure messaging into one platform
Initiates appointments immediately for urgent cases
Scales on demand with serverless, pay-as-you-go infrastructure
Results
400+ healthcare providers onboarded remotely
Thousands of patients actively using the platform
Zero downtime reported during initial usage period
Lower delivery costs achieved through dynamic AWS resource allocation
Increased provider adoption and satisfaction despite the absence of in-person training
Continuous feedback loops enabled rapid iteration and improvement
Impact & Innovation
Hiive Health’s serverless, modular architecture enables a repeatable model for rapid deployment in federal healthcare environments. The Coast Guard’s success demonstrates how government agencies can lead healthcare modernization by leveraging commercial cloud services and no-code configuration tools.
By eliminating infrastructure overhead, the platform allows developers to focus on innovation rather than maintenance, significantly shortening product development cycles and enabling continuous delivery of new capabilities.
Conclusion
The Coast Guard’s deployment of Hiive Health’s virtual care platform exemplifies how federal healthcare systems can meet urgent needs with agility, scalability, and security. Built on AWS GovCloud, the solution represents a future-ready, configurable approach to virtual care that sets a new standard for telehealth in mission-critical environments.
