Giving healthcare providers a secure, scalable solution—in the cloud

AcuteNet moves its healthcare application to the cloud to cut costs, scale its business, and ensure regulatory compliance

 Business need

AcuteNet wanted to move its application to the cloud to scale for growth and reduce costs.

Solution

The organization partnered with NTT DATA to move its software solution to the NTT DATA Cloud on Demand, which supports scalable and secure application hosting.

Benefits

• Saves $750,000 in annual operating costs by moving to the cloud.
• Onboards new customers in weeks instead of months.
• Scales from 20,000 patients and 1,000 users to more than 2.3 million patients and 10,000 users.
• Secure and compliant with HIPAA, and other government and healthcare industry regulations.

Ontario, Canada–based AcuteNet doesn’t just provide software solutions for healthcare providers—it offers a new business model and an open-source technology platform. “With our sharing economy, the cost of application infrastructure is shared across all our customers,” says Fariba Anderson, the company’s CEO. “As a result, customers can significantly reduce costs, and they have unlimited user access and clinical assessment on our platform.”

However, AcuteNet and its customers have not always been able to take advantage of the sharing-economy model. When AcuteNet was formed, it relied on a data center–based strategy to host its software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. “We owned and managed our own servers and other hardware, and that was not a sustainable way to grow our business,” Anderson says. “It wasn’t possible for us to efficiently scale, and it was very cost-prohibitive. We needed to get out of the hardware game, so we wanted to move to the cloud.”

AcuteNet sought to partner with a cloud provider that was focused on security and compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations. “In the U.S., for example, every state has its own regulatory requirements,” says Anderson. “For our customers, we needed to ensure that patient data resides physically in that state and that only authorized users can access patient data.”

Taking advantage of a turnkey cloud solution

AcuteNet chose to work with NTT DATA to implement the NTT DATA Cloud on Demand and Cloud Dedicated solutions to host the AcuteNet SaaS platform.

The AcuteNet SaaS application runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server on the NTT DATA Cloud on Demand solution. Through this platform, AcuteNet delivers and supports 7 million clinical assessments, growing at 10% per month for its U.S. and Canadian customers, delivering the right care to the right patient.

By relying on NTT DATA to host its application, AcuteNet can focus more time and resources on the software development. “We are no longer distracted by managing servers,” says Anderson. “Because NTT DATA takes care of hosting the platform, we can focus on helping our customers solve their business problems.”

Driving new business growth through rapid scalability

AcuteNet can now scale its SaaS platform quickly and efficiently, which is enabling new business growth. Using NTT DATA Cloud on Demand and Cloud Dedicated, the company is supporting more than 2.3 million patients, growing at 8% per month and 10,000+ application users, compared with 20,000 patients and 1,000 users previously. “We have significantly grown our business by relying on NTT DATA,” Anderson says. “As a result, we can provide unlimited usage on our platform.”

The organization has also gained business agility, which helps speed time-to-market. “We can bring new customers online in several weeks and meet all our customers’ compute requirements in hours because of the agility of the NTT DATA cloud solution,” says Anderson.

Saving $750,000 in annual operating costs

By taking advantage of the cloud, AcuteNet does not need to invest in hardware and other resources to support its platform. “If we weren’t using NTT DATA’s cloud solutions, we would have to pay for hardware as well as security and infrastructure personnel in the locations where our customers are,” says Anderson. “By avoiding those costs, we are saving $750,000 annually.”

The organization’s customers also save money through the sharing economy model. “Our customers only pay us for application usage based on the number of patients they have, because we distribute the cost to our entire customer base,” says Anderson. “The only way we can do that is by embracing the power of cloud computing.”

 Protecting private patient data

AcuteNet can ensure compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations by running its solution within the NTT DATA cloud. “We are helping our customers protect their patients’ data by using the NTT DATA cloud services,” Anderson says. “Each AcuteNet customer gets its own container that has a copy of our application code with the customer’s encrypted patient data. Customers’ containers can only be unlocked and decrypted by authorized users in that state or region, while patient data is locked and encrypted to everyone else—including AcuteNet. To offer the right level of compliance and security, we require a trusted partner who we know can provide us with the most reliable, scalable, and affordable cloud computing capability. Our business would not be viable without strategic partners like NTT DATA.”