Manuel Allegue, CEO Zentricx

Solving hard things: How Medifé built stable telehealth services in the midst of a global crisis

welcome to Solving for Hard Things , a new series which shows why business and technical partners are one of the most important components of any successful innovation initiative, often as important as the technology itself. In our latest edition, we heard from Manuel M. Allegue, CEO of Zentricx, a technology consultancy based in Buenos Aires and Madrid. Here he analyzes how the company worked with medife , a leading Argentine healthcare provider, to help you provide new and more reliable medical services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Business continuity and evolving to meet your customers' needs are key for almost every industry, but for healthcare they are vital. Trustworthiness is essential for open communication between patients, doctors and providers, while ensuring they can integrate new treatments and technologies. Increasingly, the basic operation of most facilities (see the consequences of all the recent cyber attacks) is increasingly dependent on secure and stable technology.

So what do you do when the unexpected happens?

It's a question nearly every healthcare organization has faced since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the challenges come in waves like the virus itself. Medifé, a nonprofit Argentine healthcare provider, had invested heavily in telehealth to serve its more than 320,000 members. While these services were essential in the early days of the pandemic, the clamor for care quickly became a problem in itself. "During the most critical phases of confinement, we had more than twice as many remote appointments as usual, with monthly peaks of 30,000 appointments." Said Leonardo Lamas, general director of Medifé.

With its new digital infrastructure, Medifé now offers telehealth to tens of thousands of members per month.

To stay ahead during the COVID surge, Medifé wanted to find ways to make telemedicine available to patients that traditionally would not have access. They contacted Google Cloud and my company, zentricx , to create and migrate to a highly scalable platform that could keep up with growing demand.

If your organization is looking to increase its reliability while addressing market demand, consider the steps we took to help Medifé with its transformation.

• Reliable and affordable scale  - Bringing together data from patients, doctors, and providers makes collaboration more seamless, but can overwhelm traditional platforms. Cloud-based infrastructure solutions, such as Firebase for application development, BigQuery data warehouse, and Google Workspace collaboration tools, helped Medifé scale on demand without additional infrastructure costs. These almost unlimited pay-as-you-go cloud services can provide only the services needed, whatever the changing needs – a new reality in our post-COVID world.
• Improve technical talent  - When any delay can become a real problem, making a smooth transition is crucial to maintaining continuity. This often starts with a trusted partner like Zentricx who can help you manage your migration, as well as provide training and support so your developers and administrators are better prepared for the challenges that inevitably arise.
• Design for the future  : At first, the challenge was finding a way to drive telehealth adoption. When it was successful, the new goal was to find ways to expand its use and usefulness. Having a roadmap in place, with the best cloud tools to deploy along the way, is important to continue driving innovation without sacrificing reliability.

Together, we helped Medifé facilitate more than 300,000 remote appointments during the initial response to the pandemic, and they now regularly handle 30,000 a month. Much of this is possible thanks to the high reliability of its platform.

If you're looking to boost reliability and meet market demands, these tactics can help too. Scalability, collaboration, and future planning can help keep your business running even when everything else is unpredictable.

Do you want to solve difficult things? To learn more about how partners help organizations get the most out of Google Cloud, you can visit our partner page .