The growing COVID-19 pandemic made robust virtual care a necessity for the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and its more than 87,000 active personnel. In October 2020, the USCG met this critical need, operationalizing its Coast Guard Care Anywhere telehealth initiative with the deployment of the Hiive Health enterprise virtual care platform. 

“The health and safety of our Coast Guard service members is a top priority,” the USCG said in a statement. “Coast Guard Care Anywhere provides a critical link between our service members and medical professionals during a time when in-person visits may not be possible. Coast Guard Care Anywhere gives the service one more tool to ensure we’re doing everything we can to promote the health, readiness, and resiliency of our Coast Guard men and women.” 

A primary goal of any virtual health initiative is to improve access to care. “USCG personnel and dependents, as well as their healthcare providers, are dispersed widely across the country. They needed a platform that can address these geographical challenges. ViiMed provides the ability to triage patients so they can be routed to the most appropriate provider, regardless of physical location,” said Brion Bennett, chief growth officer at Hiive Health, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) ISV partner. 

Serverless architecture enables rapid rollout 

Hiive Health operates its platform with AWS, using a serverless architecture on the AWS GovCloud (US). With serverless computing, AWS handles infrastructure management tasks, such as capacity provisioning and patching, as well as infrastructure security. AWS services used within the Hiive Health platform include Amazon Chime, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), AWS Lambda, Redis, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), AWS Systems Manager, and AWS WAF. 

Hiive Health plans to add or transition to additional AWS services, such as Amazon Aurora Serverless, Amazon Alexa Health, Amazon HealthLake, and Amazon Transcribe.

The shift to serverless and AWS services fosters innovation 

Hiive Health had been planning to move to serverless architecture for several months when the COVID-19 pandemic made the shift an imperative for the company. 

“We knew going serverless was going to be the best thing for us in the long term, but we would need to sideline several projects in order to make the shift. When COVID-19 hit, we knew we had to set that work aside and prepare for serious scale,” Newman said. 

The company made the move in March 2020, and as a result, was able to reassign staff members from infrastructure work to development work, driving faster innovation. After the launch of the USCG platform, Hiive Health was able to incorporate initial Coast Guard feedback within days. Before moving to serverless architecture, changes would have taken longer to implement, Newman noted. New platform capabilities and improvements are automatically available to the Coast Guard and all Hiive Health customers. 

“The transition to serverless architecture with AWS helped us drive innovation, lower costs, provide ironclad security, and improve scalability,” Newman said. “Just as important, it gave us the confidence to think even bigger and achieve our vision even faster.”