Case Study: MedStar Health achieves faster, more reliable patient search and 40% lower website costs with Amazon CloudSearch

MedStar Health - Customer Case Study

MedStar Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region, needed to consolidate 102 disparate websites into a single patient engagement portal that would let patients search for doctors, services, and locations and request appointments online. After a failed hosted attempt that produced slow performance and frequent crashes, MedStar rebuilt the portal on AWS and incorporated Amazon CloudSearch as the site’s search solution to deliver reliable, system-wide search and patient-facing functionality.

Impact Makers implemented the new cloud-based portal using AWS services, with Amazon CloudSearch powering fast, scalable search across the system. The results were significant: operating and maintenance costs fell by more than 40% per month, downtime dropped from 120 minutes to under 5 minutes per month, and page download times improved from about 1,500 ms to 120 ms—leading to lower bounce rates, increased time on page, and rising page views. Amazon CloudSearch helped enable these measurable improvements in user experience and platform reliability.

MedStar Health

Christine M. Swearingen

Executive Vice President, Planning, Marketing, and Community Relations