Case Study: Doctor care anywhere

Scale and data security in healthtech: how we helped Doctor Care Anywhere to help 60,000 people a month

Digital health app Doctor Care Anywhere allows people to book video and phone consultations with doctors, order prescriptions, and arrange follow-up healthcare all in one place.

The challenge: how to adapt to grow in healthtech

The team at Doctor Care Anywhere wanted to grow the business, but needed expert support to do it. The app’s legacy software was making it difficult to scale the service: the technology could only handle 18 consultations a month. And as with any digital product in healthtech, protecting patient data was a top priority.

The team: 25 experts with domain knowledge

The client wanted us to work like an extension of their in-house team - so we assembled 25 expert developers to work across all aspects of the project.

From 18 consultations a month to 60,000

Our work with Doctor Care Anywhere helped the company to accelerate its growth: after working with us, the app was able to support more than 60,000 video consultations a month. 

Here are a few things we did to get those results:

1. Change the architecture, unlock the potential

Our first task was to improve the architecture and standards of the software. We helped to rebuild the app, replacing the monolithic architecture with a faster, more scalable and reliable microservices setup. This allowed the app to support many concurrent consultations - and provide a more reliable service for everyone.

2. Improve video performance

With many more users on the platform, we encountered problems with the performance of video consultations. We found that the app had outgrown its current video conferencing provider - so we found an API provider that could handle the scale that Doctor Care Anywhere now needed. The switch in provider resolved the video issues and dramatically improved the user experience.

3. Put data security at the core

As the service grew, so did the need for extra data security to keep patient data safe. We developed a single sign-on approach for the platform, removing the need for multiple instances of user authentication, and reducing the risk to patient data.

Under the bonnet: the technologies we used

Server side

• Microservice architecture – for scaling under heavy load. On the applicative level, we used the Onion architecture.
• Hosted on Azure Cloud – and maintained/described using Infrastructure as a Code approach by utilization of CAF and Terraform.
• Containe management on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – and the data is split between the relational databases (Azure SQL Server) and MongoDB.
• Integrations – we integrated the system with Twilio, Stripe, Onfido, and several other third party services.

A rich UX for the web client

To support rich user experience on the web clients, we used ReactJS with TypeScript in combination with .NET MVC 5 and JQuery. For this combination we used micro frontend architecture.

And native mobile apps for performance and features

For our mobile users we developed native applications written in Kotlin and Java for Android users, in Objective-C and Swift for iOS users. By writing native applications we utilized performances and features of operating systems in the best way while allowing us high data protection.