Remedy

Innovating a Telehealth Platform During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Remedy Case Study Snapshot

TEAM SIZE

16

DURATION

7 months

TECH STACK

AWS Fargate
React
React Native
Node.js
PostgreSQL

Overview

During the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the summer of 2020, healthcare companies had to scramble to handle the physical influx of patients and find ways to support others without meeting face-to-face. The concept of Telehealth exploded, but the small startup Remedy had already been creating Telehealth platform solutions for healthcare providers. The pandemic put pressure on Remedy to rapidly scale their platform, but their system couldn’t handle the influx of traffic.

Remedy recognized that they needed to rapidly create a user-friendly, efficient, Patient-Portal that was functional and scalable. Their engineers realized that to meet that challenge quickly enough to impact the pandemic landscape, they needed to get help from an external development group. Others in the healthcare software development industry pointed them toward Calavista Software.

Calavista worked with Remedy to reimagine their patient portal, providing software and DevSecOps support to make it more modern and maintainable with strong UX and UI. During a time when Telehealth was more important than ever, we were able to launch the platform in mere months, when, according to the Remedy team, without Calavista’s partnership it would have taken at least a year. We helped their business keep up with rapidly increasing demands during unprecedented times, adapting technically and efficiently to global change.





"Calavista was so professional grade. It was buttoned-up and dialed-in and allowed us to make a huge leap in platform migration."

Parker Holcomb
VP of Engineering

Our Solution

Remedy needed a new Patient Portal to replace their existing WordPress Patient website. They wanted their portal to be on a new technology platform (mobile and web), and to scale for expected new patients and providers with a focus on Urgent Care.

In 6 months, Calavista designed and built a telemedicine system that enabled physicians to remotely deliver care to their patients, utilizing a novel scheduling algorithm that matched patients with doctors quickly and effectively in the background. We used React and React Native to build a functional portal on both mobile and web platforms, with many integration points including DrChrono, Redox, and Twilio. With an optimized UI, the application ran effectively and made it easy for users to access care.

Our Process

Scalability was key, as the projected growth for the company was only increasing. This meant that not only did we have to create something that could handle the current influx of traffic, but something that Remedy could continue to scale up in the years to come. And that’s exactly what we did.

Remedy had a Telehealth platform that worked on a small scale, so Calavista worked with them to define the requirements of a new, more robust, and sustainable platform. Then we created effective DevSecOps pipelines so that the code we’d designed and developed could be delivered seamlessly and predictably. The result was a highly dynamic, nearly fully automated environment that could handle their ever-increasing web traffic.



"As an engineer myself... the raw best practices that were just bred into the product were tangible."

Parker Holcomb
VP of Engineering

Requirements

Sometimes, customers come to us with an idea for a brand-new project. Starting from scratch, we work with them to determine and describe the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that will be the baseline of their product. But in this case, Remedy already had a product, they just wanted it to be better. The core of their system was outdated, and they wanted to remove their reliance on a commercial tool. The MVP, in this case, was updated architecture and the full user experience, realized. We reimagined what already existed to create a better, modern, maintainable platform that was still familiar to the users – i.e., the patients – who were used to it already. This is an example of how Calavista is not a bull in a China shop, forcing our customers to change everything that they do. Rather we meet our clients where they are and put their existing frameworks and their customers first.

Partnership

Calavista provides a Development Group in a Box®, but that doesn’t mean we cannot collaborate with our client’s development team. We always bring a local Solutions Director and Senior Architect, but Remedy had their own lead architect invested in the project. Rather than casting one aside, or fighting with one another, both worked together, brainstorming ideas as one team without any drama. Overall, the combined group had a balance of business, technologists, and testers – with engineers from Remedy, and Calavista working together as a single team. The architects from Remedy and Calavista quickly became a cohesive team that worked through the technical challenges quickly. Remedy noted the camaraderie between all those involved, with one employee saying, “It felt like we were getting pulled into the team, not us trying to throw together a team.”

"Working with Calavista increased engineer morale and created enthusiasm for working in the best practice ecosystem, which allowed us to hit our goals."

Parker Holcomb
VP of Engineering

DevSecOps

When we hear scalability, we think DevSecOps. Automation, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code were key elements of this project implemented to speed up processing and platform maintenance. We used AWS Fargate for serverless container implementation in order to transform their previously manual environment deployment to something that could be done dynamically, creating and destroying new environments with every code check-in. Continuous Testing also allowed us to ensure that every code check-in was stable and functional, baking in quality every step of the way.  

The Results

Even while under enormous stress to keep up with rapidly increasing volume, Calavista and Remedy were able to collaborate with incredible efficiency and effectiveness to reimagine their existing platform, delivering results in a few short months, rather than a year or more. Drawing upon our years of experience and best practices, our deep bench of developers, and utilizing our proven development processes, we were able to improve their platform to not just manage the influx of traffic, but to be scalable over time.  

Remedy was able to compete with other Telehealth platforms during the height of the pandemic, months before they would have been able to manage such traffic on their own. Not only was the end result successful, but their VP of Engineering reported that the process of working with Calavista had inspired Remedy’s internal team. They acquired an enthusiasm for working with best practices when they were most needed, during a time when they would otherwise be overwhelmed.   

If your company could benefit from this kind of partnership, reach out to us at info@calavista.com.  

Download the full Remedy
Case Study

Want a PDF of the Remedy Case Study? Fill out the form below and an email with your download will be sent to the email address provided.