Nairobi-based private hospital MP Shah Hospital is navigating the disruptions brought about by COVID-19 thanks to an investment in AWS technology.

MP Shah is a not-for-profit, private hospital. It is a modern 210-bed facility which is home to highly skilled and experienced specialists and professional medical staff.

The hospital recently invested in AWS technology to scale its business.

“Our challenges prior to considering AWS were with scalability of existing infrastructure; how to mitigate risks prevalent with on-premise infrastructure; and having better performance,” says Shiraz Dadar, CTO of MP Shah Hospital.

“With the unfortunate unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic this year, we were on the lookout for a user-friendly and secure remote meeting platform and Amazon Chime fit the bill.”

Dadar notes that AWS – being a global leader in cloud services with strong support services and a variety of services to suit the needs of MP Shah, and its offer to trial their services – made it a viable option for the private hospital to consider.

At the moment, the hospital is making use of Amazon Chime, Amazon EC2, Amazon Directory Service and Amazon WorkDocs.

“As for Amazon Chime, the experience for our doctors and patients alike to consult virtually has been a big hit,” says Dadar.

“The deployment of our server on an Amazon EC2 instance has significantly improved performance of accessing information quickly. The ease with which we are able to use the Amazon Directory Service in AWS has reduced a lot of the support tasks that came with the traditional way of doing things.”

He adds that with a focus to improve MP Shah’s customer satisfaction and improve processes, one of the areas they needed to improve on was the performance of the hospital system; and in this aspect, deploying the server on an Amazon EC2 instance has been a huge success.

“The major impact for us has been reduced cost of investment into expensive infrastructure and improved performance of the system which contributes to 100 percent efficiency.”

According to Dadar, the most noticeable benefit the hospital realised now is that it is able to focus attention on more strategic objectives.

“Currently, managing our infrastructure doesn’t take up a lot of our time as it would previously. We are also better able to manage our financial resources by reducing huge initial capital outlays and using these resources elsewhere.”

Another highlight for Dadar was the time it took to deploy AWS at the medical institution. “The support, guidance and documentation from the AWS team was awesome and we are able to deploy the services ourselves almost immediately,” he says.

“We have just begun our journey and have a long way to go but our hospital is on the right track to leverage on the services offered by AWS. I believe we are one of the first hospitals in the region to run our systems off the cloud,” Dadar concludes.