Rede Mais Saúde makes healthcare in Brazil more affordable using Oracle Cloud

Rede Mais Saúde offers affordable access to quality healthcare for Brazilians who cannot afford health insurance. The company provides online access to medical consultations in the areas of general health, cardiology, gynecology, pediatrics, dentistry, laboratory analysis, and medical imaging diagnostics.

Rede Mais Saúde (which translates to The Healthiest Network) has a network of more than 10,000 health service providers through which patients can obtain up to 70% discounts for treatment. The company has created a data-driven health ecosystem where any health provider can plug into its platform with ease.

To expand the platform and become a leading health technology company in Brazil, Rede Mais Saúde needed greater scalability and availability of services. In 2019, it decided to move to a cloud platform, as part of a mission by new CIO and CTO Douglas Moreira to restructure the IT department, implement an agile development culture, and deliver an innovative, omnichannel healthcare service.

Rede Mais Saúde looked at Azure, AWS, and IBM, but it found the performance and security of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Autonomous Database best suited its large database of patient and provider information. “There is no way I could not migrate to Oracle,” Moreira says. “And should the company go public one day, we will be extremely well structured in terms of data, compliance, and disaster recovery.”

By moving to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database on OCI, Rede Mais Saúde scaled its platform and services by 80% compared with on-premises. This allowed the company to onboard new healthcare providers quickly and expand its reach to more Brazilian citizens who are unable to pay insurance premiums. The autonomous database relieved staff from data management complexities and freed up time to develop new, innovative offerings 4X faster, with higher quality and performance, while saving 70% of previous administrative costs.

Additionally, self-encryption with the autonomous database and OCI’s integrated security features enhanced data privacy and protection. That led to significant financial savings by lowering the development burden to help to prevent cyberattacks. “The solution’s deployment in OCI automatically met all security, operational resilience, privacy by design, source code, and application resilience requirements for compliance,” Moreira says.

In terms of protecting information, OCI’s integrated security features ensured a very high level of security to the environment. That led to significant financial savings by lowering the development burden to prevent cyberattacks and provide data protection. “The result was spectacular,” Moreira says. “The solution’s deployment in OCI automatically met all security, operational resilience, privacy by design, source code, and application resilience requirements.”

Moreover, OCI helped Rede Mais Saúde significantly cut its data processing costs. Storing and managing its data using Oracle Autonomous Database means that the company does not require a DBA. “Oracle Cloud is costing me only 30% of what I previously paid a database maintenance team,” Moreira says. “Now I don't need to worry about scaling, backup process, tuning, security and disk capacity. The Autonomous database offers all of these services with machine learning-oriented automation.”

Rede Mais Saúde uses Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing to consolidate and analyze large amounts of primary healthcare data, which helps it understand how citizens consume healthcare services. Moreira explains: “On OCI we can easily set up an instance, model a data structure, and plug in AI tools to understand the behaviors of each category of people and their health consumption. That yields a wealth of insights for our business.”

The company operates three database environments for test, development, and production, with the live database partitioned into workspaces for managing specific commercial offerings for each customer as needed.

For rapidly building and deploying low-code applications, Moreira’s team uses Oracle Application Express (APEX) as one of its main development platforms, drawing on Oracle Cloud’s fully managed and secured environment. “APEX is an amazing tool. We accomplish in days what used to take weeks, so our productivity increased a lot,” Moreira says.

Rede Mais Saúde has also deployed Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) for orchestrating the integration layer with its business-to-business health service provider platform.

For disaster recovery Rede Mais Saúde used Oracle Data Guard to replicate its standby database. The team staged a crisis simulation test by stopping the production environment, migrating everything to the disaster recovery site, and then managed to restore all databases and applications within 25 minutes. “The feeling I got with Oracle Data Guard was like a Formula 1 pit stop,” says Moreira. “Now I can put my energy into delivering the best products without worrying about potential disasters.”

Oracle Consulting Services worked alongside the Rede Mais Saúde team to migrate and re-architect data from the on-premises system onto OCI. The migration took less than four months.