Transforming Physician Communication to Improve Patient Care

PubNub is a leader in real time messaging delivery for web, mobile and IoT. Distillery loves the fact that PubNub built a global scalable infrastructure that we can plug into our projects and deliver value for our clients faster.
Andrey Kudievskiy CEO of Distillery

MedX is an Australian iPhone- and Android-based secure messaging system for AHPRA (the Australian equivalent of the US’s HIPAA compliance) medical doctors. The app offers free doctor-to-doctor messaging, legal compliance, a searchable directory and end-to-end encryption. MedX improves quality of care for patients by allowing doctors to quickly chat with each other, share test results and communicate urgent medical information. Distillery is a full-service software design and development company for startups and enterprises.

Challenge

Building chat for the healthcare industry is more than just writing code. Strict compliance, complex rules, and closely-monitored regulation of sensitive healthcare data is stored and sent isn’t just an expectation - it’s a legal requirement. As a result, everything from the backend infrastructure to the end user features needs to be carefully-deployed, and maintained at a higher level of sophistication than other industries. After releasing the first version of their application, MedX started to notice stability issues with their backend infrastructure, as well as bugs with their client application. Devoting internal resources to focus on improving reliability, the MedX team quickly recognized that it lacked the domain knowledge to continue to improve and innovate their app. With over 23,000 physicians using the application, MedX needed to improve reliability, and open up the opportunity to create new, innovative features for their users.

Solution

MedX approached Distillery to rebuild the current version of their product, remedy existing bugs, deploy a reliable and secure backend infrastructure, and add new features required by their large user base of physicians. In turn, Distillery called upon PubNub to deliver the reliable backend messaging infrastructure, and to power all the new interactive real-time features. PubNub does the heavy-lifting involved in orchestrating and maintaining a global infrastructure, which massively reduces the developer resource requirements otherwise called upon for in-house projects.

With the help of PubNub technology, we produced a more functional version of the application for our client. Unlike many other instant messaging integrations, PubNub offers powerful technology that’s easy to set up. PubNub provides MedX with the real-time technology that makes MedX a reliable, modern solution for busy practitioners, Andrey Kudievskiy CEO of Distillery

Using PubNub’s reliable infrastructure and

, Distillery was able to dedicate the lion’s share of the project to developing interactive, differentiating features MedX wanted. They were quickly able to release features like a real-time medical newsfeed and real-time message translation to automatically translate chat messages between users without a common spoken language. The language translation feature uses Amazon Translate and PubNub Functions to serverlessly process and deliver the messages.

Speed is so important when you deal with chat applications or with IoT devices. When you build your own system you have to deal with different regions and make sure you’re covering them all or else it doesn’t deliver instantly everywhere. But with PubNub there is never a lag and the speed of delivering messages is high, Alexander Timonin Senior Software Engineer at Distillery

Impact

For any software design and development company, balancing the delivery of a high-quality, reliable product with fast time to market is the difference between success and failure. In this case, Distillery was able to do both; and with a rock-solid, reliable, and secure backend infrastructure, they can continue to deliver new features quickly. PubNub’s globally-redundant infrastructure sets MedX up for stress-free and successful international expansion. With an upcoming release in France and the UK, MedX can be confident that releasing the app outside of Australia will not compromise the reliability of the application. Physicians will enjoy the same low-latency, high-performance experience that they do in Australia.

PubNub is a leader in real time messaging delivery for Web, Mobile and IoT. Distillery loves the fact that PubNub built a global scalable infrastructure that we can plug into our projects and deliver value for our clients faster, Kudievskiy