Manuel Allegue, CEO Zentricx

Solving Hard Things: How Medifé Built Stable Telehealth Services Amid a Global Crisis

Welcome to Solving for Hard Things, a new series showcasing why business and technical partners are among the most important components of any successful innovation initiative, often as crucial as the technology itself. In our latest edition, we hear from Manuel M. Allegue, CEO of Zentricx, a technology consulting firm based in Buenos Aires and Madrid. He discusses how the company worked with Medifé, a major Argentine healthcare provider, to help deliver new and more reliable medical services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Business continuity and evolving to meet customer needs are key for almost all industries, but they are vital for healthcare. Reliability 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 (look at the consequences of recent cyber-attacks) relies more on secure and stable technology.

So, what do you do when the unexpected happens?

This is a question faced by almost all healthcare organizations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with challenges coming in waves like the virus itself. Medifé, a non-profit Argentine healthcare provider, had invested heavily in telehealth to serve its over 320,000 members. While these services were essential in the early days of the pandemic, the surge in demand quickly became a problem in itself. “During the most critical phases of lockdown, we had more than double the usual remote appointments, 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 each month.

To stay ahead during the COVID surge, Medifé wanted to find ways to make telemedicine available to patients who traditionally wouldn’t have access. They reached out to 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 reliability while addressing market demand, consider the steps we took to help Medifé with its transformation:

• Reliable and Affordable Scaling: Gathering data from patients, doctors, and providers makes collaboration smoother but can overwhelm traditional platforms. Cloud-based infrastructure solutions, such as Firebase for app development, BigQuery for data storage, and Google Workspace collaboration tools, helped Medifé scale on demand without additional infrastructure costs. These nearly unlimited pay-as-you-go cloud services can provide just the needed services, whatever the changing needs: a new reality in our post-COVID world.
• Enhance Technical Talent: When any delay can turn into a real problem, a seamless transition is crucial for maintaining continuity. Often, this starts with a reliable partner like Zentricx who can help manage your migration, provide training and support to better prepare your developers and administrators for inevitable challenges.
• Design for the Future: Initially, the challenge was finding a way to drive telehealth adoption. Once successful, the new goal was to find ways to expand its use and utility. Having an implemented roadmap, with the best cloud tools to deploy along the way, is crucial for continuing to drive innovation without sacrificing reliability.

Together, we helped Medifé facilitate over 300,000 remote appointments during the initial pandemic response, and they now handle 30,000 monthly. Much of this is possible due to the high reliability of their platform.

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

Want to solve hard things? For more information on how partners help organizations maximize Google Cloud, visit our partner page