Science House Medicals speeds medical testing by 4X with Oracle MySQL HeatWave

The pathology solutions provider services hub labs in community health centers in smaller towns in India. Science House Medicals manages the detailed and complex process of maintaining collection points in remote places, along with tracking live samples.

It was critical that the company could complete tests and provide patient reports within a minimum turnaround time to help treat patients effectively. Yet, it wasn’t certain the Science House Medical’s Lab Management System (LMS) to support testing and reporting could handle the many thousands of tests coming in daily from 1,690 collection centers for processing at 390 labs. The company was running MySQL Community Edition for the LMS, making it hard to expand the infrastructure in line with the growing workloads. Plus, there were more than 300 on-premises instances of the MySQL database to manage across the lab sites, making administration time consuming.

Science House Medicals was already using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run several workloads not connected with the management of its labs. And it wanted to repeat this success by moving MySQL Enterprise Edition to  Oracle MySQL HeatWave on OCI, which offered performance at a more cost-effective price than other cloud providers.

Since Oracle MySQL HeatWave is a managed database service, the company could offload time-consuming administration tasks, including high availability setups, security patches, upgrades, and provisioning. The Science House Medicals IT team could then focus more on core development and addressing operational challenges.

An Oracle technical team made itself available to support the migration from the beginning. It helped with the process of moving data from the on-premises instances to OCI, ensuring the work was completed on time and on budget.

By migrating to Oracle MySQL HeatWave , LMS performance scaled easily as demands for PCR testing and COVID-19 patient diagnostics grew. OCI helped gather test data from small community centers even in remote areas of India, while ensuring data integrity and ease of access. At its peak, the LMS processed 350,000 tests over 11 days and delivered test reports twice as fast as previously, exceeding its SLA with the Indian government.

The migration also significantly improved the performance of Science House Medicals’ IT operations. The move to MySQL HeatWave on OCI delivered significant cost savings and simplified management. Migrating to OCI centralized management so IT engineers no longer had to visit the on-premises locations for administration tasks. The Oracle MySQL HeatWave staff also took over control of routine tasks, saving the company more time and lowering expense further.

Additionally, the lab system now has complete end-to-end data security with MySQL HeatWave. Compliance with healthcare data regulations and data protection laws are enhanced, and monitoring is simple using the MySQL Enterprise Monitor.

Science House Medicals is also using MySQL HeatWave to help the Indian government to combat Thalassemia. The condition is an inherited blood disorder that causes anemia. The company is assisting the government in testing for the condition in remote rural areas, collecting data from 15,000 testing locations. It took just seven days to launch the necessary environments on OCI to support the initiative.

Mediquity Technologies, a healthtech company, is the IT partner of Science House Medicals. Mediquity identified MySQL Heatwave as the right fit for the challenge at hand and implemented the necessary environments on OCI in just seven days.