Case Study: MedStar Health achieves faster, more reliable patient engagement with Amazon Web Services

MedStar Health - Customer Case Study

MedStar Health, the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region with 10 hospitals, 250+ outpatient sites, and 30,000 associates, set out to unify its fragmented online presence into a single patient engagement portal so patients could easily find doctors, services, locations, and request appointments. An initial hosted build proved slow, unstable, and expensive—causing lost appointments, frustrated users, and the decision to abandon and rebuild the portal.

Working with Impact Makers, MedStar rebuilt the portal on AWS using services such as Amazon VPC, EC2, S3, CloudSearch, ElastiCache, and CloudWatch, with AWS Support validating architecture and performance. The new site cut operating costs by over 40% per month, reduced downtime from 120 to fewer than 5 minutes monthly, and improved page load times from ~1,500 ms to 120 ms—resulting in lower bounce rates, longer session times, increased page views, and a scalable foundation for future mobile, social, and web services.

MedStar Health

Christine M. Swearingen

Executive Vice President, Planning, Marketing, and Community Relations