Unprecedented demand for Telehealth services
Skin cancer is a preventable disease and is highly curable with early detection by a skilled skin care doctor. Unfortunately, most people do not get regular skin cancer checks because of time and money. Helfie is a Melbourne-based early stage tech startup that wants to change that. Users simply send a selfie of their skin and a registered doctor will perform a diagnosis.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a surge in demand for telehealth services. Helfie's value proposition had attracted interest from skin care doctors around Australia. Helfie reached out to Alembic to provide an assessment and recommended approach to onboard new users (doctors and patients) efficiently and to ensure that diagnoses could be conducted quickly.
Scale up the Helfie platform
Given that Helfie's choice of technology closely aligned with Alembic's stack: Typescript for backend, GraphQL for APIs and React for the frontend, Alembic was able to take advantage of our experience immediately to quickly assess, plan and develop required functionality. Some of the applications included practice management for doctors and practice managers, email notifications for new checkups, a referral system for clinics to invite their existing patients, and reporting.
Alembic also introduced processes and tool to enhance team agility. As everyone worked remotely, the team collaborated and communicated daily through practices such as user stories writing, work prioritisation, and weekly showcases. This proved successful for Helfie as throughout the project, everyone in the team had a shared understanding of the software requirements. This contributed directly to the successful and timely delivery of features.
6x increase in checkup requests
The Helfie application was built iteratively within three months of Alembic beginning work on the project. The number of checkups requested by patients increased sixfold. Also, the process of onboarding new doctors and their patients was automated which empowered the founding team to focus on increasing their customer base; helping more doctors and practice managers connect with patients in need of a skin diagnosis.
Why We Love Helfie
The leaders of Helfie are both skilled and determined professionals who care deeply about how their users benefit from using their products. With their deep knowledge of the telehealth domain, they prioritised work that was the most valuable to the business, which meant Alembic had great confidence in building the right features.
Above all, we appreciate the problem Helfie is solving. We love creating applications that help people save time and money, and in this case potentially lives.