InstantScripts: Delivering convenient access to digital healthcare services for Australians
About InstantScripts
Founded in Melbourne in 2018, InstantScripts is a digital medical clinic that enables users to access services ranging from online scripts to telehealth consultations anywhere in Australia, every day from 6 am to midnight.
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Contact usWith Google Cloud and Firebase, InstantScripts enables Australian users to access health services online, and stakeholders to understand and implement measures to reduce the incidence of chronic conditions in communities.
Google Cloud results
- Operates 18 hours a day for 5 years and counting
- Deploys new releases up to three times a day to support product-led innovation
- Enables users to interact with healthcare services as frictionlessly as they interact with travel, transport, food, fitness and other services
Enables growth to 100,000 digital and telehealth consultations per month
Digital healthcare and telehealth demand grew quickly during the pandemic and continues to rise as Australians become more accustomed to them.
The digital platform has also enabled more patients in rural Australia who previously may not have access to quality healthcare, to gain access to specialists.
According to research from professional services firm PwC, about three-quarters of Australian consumers, including 94 percent of those aged 25 to 44, are open to using virtual health services in future. This change is fuelling a surge in demand for the services provided by InstantScripts, an online medical clinic that provides services ranging from online scripts to telehealth consultations from 6 am to midnight every day.
Founded in 2018, InstantScripts aims to address inefficiencies in the provision of standard healthcare services. Running on Google Cloud, InstantScripts has grown to the point that InstantScripts doctors complete more than 100,000 consultations per month. While the business is headquartered in Melbourne, its doctors and employees operate in locations around the country.
"We became a success story during the pandemic with rapid growth in online prescription demand during that period," explains Richard Skimin, Chief Operating Officer, InstantScripts. "This hasn’t slowed down and in the last 12 months alone our business has more than doubled in size."
Beyond the short-term growth driven by pandemic restrictions, digital healthcare and telehealth are benefiting from the trend towards consumerization of services and elevated consumer experiences. "Patients are also consumers and want to eliminate friction from interactions with service providers," says Skimin. "So from a business and technology perspective, this means delivering a mobile-first, cloud-based platform that allows consumers to interact with a digital healthcare services provider as seamlessly as they do with digital services providers in travel, transport, food, and fitness."
Choosing a cloud platform that’s developer-friendly and scalable
With an eye on growth from day one of operations, InstantScripts evaluated products and services from a range of cloud providers. "This was a basic architectural decision that would shape the company for years to come," says Maxim Shklyar, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at InstantScripts.
"Scalability drove our technology strategy, and Google Cloud and Firebase met our requirements while aligning with the development focus of a digital business in startup mode. The services provided were comprehensive and a very good fit for a small development team and a development-oriented environment."
"Scalability drove our technology strategy, and Google Cloud and Firebase met our requirements while aligning with the development focus of a digital business in startup mode. The services provided were comprehensive and a very good fit for a small development team and a development-oriented environment."
—Maxim Shklyar, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, InstantScriptsUsing his own development experience and Google Cloud’s detailed, intuitive documentation, Shklyar was able to establish a Google Cloud infrastructure and Firebase application development architecture that met InstantScripts’ long-term requirements. The business then developed a prototype and went into production in August 2018.
Firebase provides authentication, database and web hosting services, while Google Cloud provides database, compute, log management and secure storage for files and sensitive data. Firebase Hosting hosts InstantScripts’ websites and front ends and App Engine its back-end application. "Both are extremely easy to use and we can deploy with one command line in two to three minutes," says Shklyar. "They are extremely developer-friendly and do not require us to invest in people with specialist skills or undertake difficult iterations." In addition, InstantScripts’ Google Cloud and Firebase databases have scaled seamlessly since the business’s establishment to store terabytes of data of about 600,000 users.
With the business capturing and storing sensitive customer data, security is a key priority. The defense-in-depth, multi-layered security features of Google Cloud provide deep protection against intrusion or disruption, while InstantScripts also uses Security Command Center to identify any security misconfigurations and compliance violations, and detect threats.
"Security Command Center has helped us identify some misconfigurations that we’ve improved, and to keep an eye on suspicious activity," says Shklyar. In addition, the integration of Firebase Authentication with other Firebase and Google Cloud services contributes to the organization’s robust security posture.
InstantScripts logs events and data such as what users access, what requests they make and where they come from, with BigQuery providing cloud-based warehousing to enable analytics.
"BigQuery is particularly helpful when we need to investigate exactly what is happening," says Shklyar. "While we’re not using everything yet, we’re planning to make some more decisions based on the datasets we have in BigQuery." These datasets incorporate data from logs incorporating billions of events per month.
"Security Command Center has helped us identify some misconfigurations that we’ve improved, and to keep an eye on suspicious activity."
—Maxim Shklyar, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, InstantScriptsDelivering insights into community health issues
InstantScripts is already using BigQuery to analyze patient medicines ordering data by geography and identify communities with pockets of chronic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol. Using that data, the business provides an information factsheet to stakeholders such as local politicians, giving them an opportunity to act on improving the healthcare system.
"We find political leaders are very concerned about their constituents presenting at emergency departments with basic primary healthcare needs. We provide local politicians information from InstantScripts about the behavior of their communities so they can make better decisions about how to serve them," says Skimin. "We also analyze data about the behavior of our doctors, such as the prescribing of antibiotics, to identify outliers and work with them to ensure they are following clinical protocols."
Powered by Google Cloud, InstantScripts is scaling to support increasing demand, and Maxim says the business has no need to re-architect or rebuild its applications or environment. "With our managed Google Cloud architecture, we can simply add memory or instances, or break down services into smaller chunks without manual intervention."
Campaigns or publicity drive occasional minor upticks with the only peak experienced between Christmas and New Year when people travel and need access to doctors and medication, meaning demand for prescriptions or other medical services with InstantScript triples. "Over five years, operating 18 hours a day, 6 am to midnight, we’ve had less than an hour’s infrastructure downtime, so we’re very happy with the performance and availability delivered by Google Cloud," says Skimin.
Deploying new releases up to three times a day
While not setting specific targets, the business always aims to improve speed and other elements of the user experience. InstantScripts is also agile enough to deploy new releases at a rate of three times per day, with the ability to create development environments and test prior to production minimizing issues that occur when new products or features go live.
Ultimately, with Google Cloud, InstantScripts is working with a provider that can grow with its business. “Our strategy is based on product-led innovation, so we’re constantly releasing new features and capabilities,” says Skimin, "With Google Cloud, we are working with a platform that enables dynamic release cycles. Google Cloud is leading the way in capabilities such as healthcare APIs, machine learning and AI that we can adopt to accelerate our own growth."
"Our strategy is based on product-led innovation, so we’re constantly releasing new features and capabilities. With Google Cloud, we are working with a platform that enables dynamic release cycles. Google Cloud is leading the way in capabilities such as healthcare APIs, machine learning and AI that we can adopt to accelerate our own growth."
—Richard Skimin, Chief Operating Officer, InstantScriptsTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About InstantScripts
Founded in Melbourne in 2018, InstantScripts is a digital medical clinic that enables users to access services ranging from online scripts to telehealth consultations anywhere in Australia, every day from 6 am to midnight.