The Customer
Coviu is a telehealth software-as-a-service company, built on AWS. It enables healthcare providers to hold video telehealth sessions in a secure environment with Australian data storage, supporting Australian regulations and privacy principals. Key to Coviu is how it enables clinicians to use digital clinical tools for diagnosis and therapy, as well as how it supports the workflows of healthcare businesses.
Coviu was first created within the Australian research organisation CSIRO as part of research into telehealth delivery platforms. Working closely with clinicians, they found that existing consumer video calling software and corporate video conferencing applications were not appropriate for healthcare services. Not only do they not satisfy the stringent security and privacy requirements of healthcare businesses, but they miss important business functions such as collecting payments, making appointment bookings, and gathering patient consent.
Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, as the Australian Government approved Medicare rebates for telehealth calls, Coviu has seen explosive growth. With that growth, infrastructure challenges were encountered that Coviu were not prepared for. To continue to service their current and new customers, they needed to get someone in quickly to help scale their infrastructure systems securely and ensure their software continued to run smoothly to support their customers.
The Challenge
During the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, a massive number of clinicians started to sign up on the Coviu website. Coviu’s telehealth software signups grew by over 6,000% and they were struggling to keep their servers going and to monitor all systems. Scaling from 400 to 25,000 consultations a day put a massive amount of load on servers and increased the need to scale quickly and reliably.
Due to the growth, Coviu were also identifying bugs in their software that they were unaware of and were looking for a partner that could review the Coviu application, help with their architecture setup and provide monitoring and remediation while helping to scale.
The Solution
“We engaged with AC3 to help us deal with our AWS infrastructure setup during the beginning of the pandemic. We were struggling to keep our service up and to monitor all our systems. AC3 came in, put the monitoring in place and helped address outages to reduce the time off air and remove any reoccurrance,” says Silvia Pfeiffer, CEO & Director of Coviu.
AC3 offered a solution to Coviu that consisted of a review of the Coviu application and infrastructure architecture and monitoring and provided immediate remediation to help scale to portentially hundreds of thousands of calls and users per day. AC3 deployed DataDog and CloudHealth for Coviu as well as scaling up AWS services. AC3 then further helped Coviu go through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance effort and continues to run the ISG with them.
The Results
The massive healthcare industry shift from in-person care to virtual care delivered via telehealth due to the coronavirus pandemic forced the healthcare industry to quickly adopt telehealth solutions in order to provide patient care, accessibility and remote patient monitoring. Video telehealth allowed patients and practitioners to conduct safe, reliable, secure and efficient consultations – Coviu specifically conducted over 3 million telehealth consultations in Australia in 2020 alone. Fast forward to late 2021, although many countries are slowly returning to a more ‘normal’ state with the roll-out of the vaccine, telehealth is still on an upward trend. Partnering with AC3 has allowed Coviu to scale quickly and continue to support their customers with a seamless experience, on trusted and secure software.
