RedSalud meets telemedicine challenges by implementing SAP for Google Cloud

RedSalud, a Chilean private health services company, began a technological innovation journey with the support of Google Cloud. It faced the challenge of meeting its main goal of providing quality and affordable healthcare through nine clinics, over 40 medical and dental centers, and with over 8,000 employees and 5,000 doctors throughout the country.

The company saw Kochasoft as an ally for implementing SAP for Google Cloud and starting a new stage with cloud technology. It managed to address one of the organization’s greatest challenges: to continue providing medical services within the challenging context caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The shift towards technological innovation was crucial for maintaining high-quality standards during this period. The organization had to overcome structural barriers and go one step further to continue providing the highest safety conditions to employees, healthcare professionals, and patients.

The first steps towards transformation

Right from the start, RedSalud implemented a technological strategy focused on operating fully in the public cloud, as well as on high availability and low cost. This meant that several of the SAP and non-SAP proposals had to be adapted to operate with workloads outside the country and with efficient integrations to their legacy systems.

Kochasoft's initiative for implementing solutions that could achieve a stable platform at a minimum monthly cost was vital during this process. And it was possible thanks to native Google Cloud tools, such as Cloud Storage for backups, BigQuery as a data warehouse, Looker Studio for analytics and Apigee for integrations.

This approach entailed strengthening the infrastructure and operations across clinics and medical and dental centers.

In March 2020, RedSalud also faced the imperative need of continuing to deliver healthcare in an all-new and unusual context.

While the pandemic forced the healthcare industry to take giant leaps in technological innovation, RedSalud managed to adapt earlier to new forms of healthcare and people's behavior thanks to a transformation journey it had already begun.

Thus, by implementing telemedicine, the company, together with Kochasoft, developed a remote medical care system in record time to replicate the experience of having a doctor at home.

Given this challenge, all RedSalud clinics made their critical infrastructure, supply chain, medical equipment, and expertise available to the integrated public-private network to deliver the healthcare services the country needed.

This also entailed having more and more solutions to digitize processes to streamline and optimize the work of RedSalud’s professionals.

Deployment of solutions

RedSalud currently has a multicloud strategy with productive platforms in three public clouds after deploying two core platforms in Google Cloud (SAP S/4HANA and HIS).

This meant leaving behind the model of on-premises networks and data centers and prioritizing connectivity and data security across operations.

To this end, RedSalud began to use Compute Engine to host SAP databases and applications, Cloud Storage to exchange information with legacy systems, and Cloud Load Balancing to provide connectivity to SAP Fiori through the internet.

First results with Google Cloud

One of the most important aspects is that Kochasoft now guarantees RedSalud 99.90% uptime per month, strongly leveraged by the Google Cloud architecture.

At the same time, having a solid architecture ensures operational consistency by transferring a large part of the analytics and BI team workload to non-productive platforms. This has enabled the company to work with data it did not have before.

Today, RedSalud works with several terabytes of data on a daily basis without risking operations. The company has achieved significant savings to ensure operational continuity by reducing machine size and lowering consumption in the cloud.

Google Workspace tools, together with the scaling and optimization opportunities of BigQuery and Looker Studio, have proved essential in providing information to the entire organization. Everyone can now leverage data without being SQL/ETL experts.

In turn, implementing Google Cloud solutions not only improved process agility and platform availability but also brought financial benefits, with infrastructure cost savings between 30% and 50%.

Focusing on the future

On this journey, RedSalud has faced one of the challenges that the healthcare industry is going through as a consequence of the pandemic: ensuring the continuity of treatment and consultations for millions of patients worldwide.

Today, the company's efforts are centered on supporting patients by providing quality healthcare at affordable prices as postponed check-ups, procedures, and surgeries resume. This support requires efficient processes to ensure cost-effective products and services for patients.

Meanwhile, RedSalud is constantly looking for ways to simplify operations, focusing on lower costs and higher agility to provide better services to its patients.

Thanks to the partnership with Google Cloud and Kochasoft, RedSalud can now go a step further in each of these goals.