Brazilian TeleMedicine SaaS ISV moves its videoconferencing platform to MySQL HeatWave for performance, security, and support.
Introduction & Background
With physicians in multiple specialty fields, the telemedicine platform “Dr Mais On-Line” is rapidly gaining traction in Brazil’s online elective care market. Its software allows people to consult specialists for medical guidance, diagnosis, and treatment, from the comfort of their home, without having to wait or travel, which saves both time and money.
Dr Mais, also known as Dr+, focuses on delivering quality and cost-effectiveness through a cloud-based application developed in 2021, during the biggest health-related crisis of the century. The offering consists of online consultation, patient-doctor videoconferencing, and resultant electronic health records (EHR).
Business Challenges & Goals
The company chose MySQL Community Edition as its development environment and initially hosted the system on Google Cloud.However, the virtual private network (VPN) connection to servers in North America resulted in unacceptable latency as well as excessive cost. Additionally, the database was not providing sufficient simultaneous client connections and performance was lagging.Dr+ looked for a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution to address sluggish performance, higher security, and improved connectivity to a cloud infrastructure.
In 2022, the telemedicine company migrated its entire platform—the MySQL database, streaming video call servers, application servers, and Application Programming Interface (API) servers—to MySQL HeatWave, fully managed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Business Results & Metrics
In moving to MySQL HeatWave, Dr+ gained an immediate 50% productivity improvement stemming from the high performance and high availability of OCI.
Switching to MySQL HeatWave has given it the leverage to meet growth in a dynamic online healthcare market. The predictable costs of cloud consumption, higher performance, and personalized support from the MySQL Team have provided it with the technology impetus to expand across all of Brazil.
The telemedicine company saw an upsurge in customer numbers, as user satisfaction rose with faster response time, translating to website pages loading instantaneously, commands executed more rapidly, and thus quicker access to online medical care.
Dr+ developers also enjoyed the improved time to market for introducing new products and releases, as well as no longer having to firefight on-premises server issues. They now focus on developing and innovating the platform for expansion within Brazil’s online healthcare market.
Moving its system from Google servers in North America to OCI’s Sao Paolo data center immediately solved speed and latency issues, with Dr+ connected 24/7 via OCI VPN Connect.
MySQL HeatWave has also increased security since access control is stricter. MySQL Backup and encrypted VPN traffic between company premises and Oracle Cloud have allayed previous concerns over data vulnerability.
Entrusting Oracle to manage the automation of tasks such as backup and recovery, database and operating system configuration and patching has enabled Dr+ to focus on research and development to promote access to quality medical care through telemedicine.
Moreover, not having to maintain its own infrastructure has helped Dr+ in its sustainability goals, diminishing its energy footprint by eliminating refrigeration and other on-premises energy-intensive overhead.
Why MySQL HeatWave
Before switching from MySQL Community Edition, Dr+ tried out the Oracle Cloud Free Tier offering and was impressed with the speed, performance, stability, high availability, and security.
Aided by MySQL Support, it conducted a proof of concept and, pleased with the result, took the decision to migrate to MySQL HeatWave. Lower cost compared to Google and the support from the MySQL team were also factors in the decision.
“Our telemedicine platform is a critical system and by engaging with MySQL Support we gained a partner that understands our goals and will help us to scale out and grow,” said Alexandre Barbieri.
Implementation
Dr+ worked with MySQL staff to set up a test environment that ran for one month and then carried out in-flight migration of the platform to MySQL HeatWave using MySQL Shell.
Within a four-hour window, the company shut down the MySQL Community Edition database, exported the data, created the storage space, imported the data, configured the settings, and was running MySQL HeatWave.
Next Steps
Dr+’s customer relationship management (CRM) application is the basis for the electronic health record (EHR) that each patient obtains through the service. One of its goals is to further develop the EHR system with MySQL HeatWave in order to sell it to clinics and hospitals which need digital medical and treatment histories of their patients.