Akoma Health Case Study - Scaling a Health Care System Leveraging AWS

Reliable access to digital services is critical, especially when users depend on them for personal support. Whether it’s scheduling a doctor’s appointment or joining a virtual therapy session, people rely on technology to work instantly and without interruption.

Every click, every session, every connection needs to feel seamless, not because the task is simple, but because the underlying infrastructure is built for performance, stability, and scalability.

Client Overview

Akoma Health, a pioneering teletherapy platform providing culturally conscious mental health services for Africans and the diaspora. They offer confidential, one-on-one therapy sessions with qualified therapists and clinical psychologists, accessible online through various platforms. Their goal is to make mental health support more accessible, affordable, and reliable for Africans, helping them "get stronger" and "stay stronger".

Traditional Architecture Limitations

Prior to AWS transformation, Akoma Health operated with:

• Physical servers with manual VM provisioning
• Monolithic application with manual deployments
• Single database instance with no high availability
• Manual backup and recovery processes
• Limited monitoring and no automated alerting
• No disaster recovery strategy

Business Challenges

Akoma Health faced significant infrastructure challenges that threatened their ability to deliver reliable mental health services:

• Manual Infrastructure Management: VM-based deployment with manual configuration leading to inconsistent environments

• Database Reliability Issues: Frequent downtime affecting therapy session bookings and patient data access

• Scaling Limitations: Unable to handle peak demand during mental health awareness campaigns

• Healthcare Compliance Concerns: Difficulty maintaining HIPAA-equivalent standards and audit trails

• Global Latency Issues: Poor performance for diaspora users across different continents

• Development Bottlenecks: Teams spending 70% of time on infrastructure management rather than product development

CloudPlexo’s Solutions

Akoma Health partnered with CloudPlexo to rebuild their infrastructure on AWS. This wasn’t just a lift-and-shift. It was a strategic redesign that enabled speed, compliance, and resilience.

Here’s how it came together:

Containerized Application on AWS

• Amazon ECS and Fargate enabled Akoma to break their monolith into manageable microservices, with zero server maintenance.

• Amazon ECR provided secure image storage, version control, and seamless integration into their build pipelines.

Database Reliability & Performance

• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL was deployed in Multi-AZ mode, ensuring high availability and automatic failover.

• Read replicas improved speed for read-heavy operations like session histories and patient dashboards.

• Point-in-time recovery meant that accidental data issues were no longer a source of fear.

CI/CD & Monitoring

• AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy automated the entire deployment lifecycle, updates now take minutes, not hours.

• Blue/green deployments reduced downtime and made rollbacks safe and easy.

• CloudWatch and CloudTrail introduced full visibility and audit trails across systems, a major win for compliance.

Resilience & Scalability

• Application Load Balancer and Auto Scaling ensured that the platform could handle traffic spikes without affecting therapy sessions.

• AWS CloudFormation defined everything as code, from VPCs to ECS services, so environments could be replicated and managed with confidence.

Security

• AWS Secrets Manager was implemented to securely store sensitive credentials, keeping patient data safe from exposure.

• Service discovery via Cloud Map ensured seamless microservice communication without hardcoding endpoints.

Results

With the new infrastructure in place:

• Akoma Health now delivers 99.9% uptime for therapy sessions with zero data loss, supported by automated backups and high availability.

• The platform handles 10x traffic surges and operates smoothly across regions and time zones. Support tickets dropped by 60%, and infrastructure costs were reduced by 45% through containerization.

• Security and compliance standards now meet healthcare-grade requirements, with encryption, access controls, and full audit logging in place.

• Developer productivity increased significantly, cutting infrastructure overhead from 70% to 15% and accelerating feature delivery by 80%.

Conclusion

Every glitch, every minute of downtime, could affect your business in different ways. Akoma Health’s shift to a modern, cloud-native infrastructure has minimized those risks while unlocking greater reliability, scalability, and security.

By investing in a robust foundation, the team now delivers uninterrupted care, builds faster, and operates with confidence, no matter where their users are or when they need support.