Building a Scalable Telemedicine Platform
The shift toward digital-first healthcare delivery accelerated dramatically in recent years, with telemedicine moving from a niche offering to a core service for many providers. When a regional healthcare organisation sought to launch a telemedicine platform at scale, they faced the dual challenge of moving quickly while meeting the strict security and reliability requirements that clinical systems demand.
Requirements: Speed, Security, and Scale
The client needed a platform capable of supporting video consultations, secure messaging, electronic prescriptions, and integration with existing electronic health records (EHR) systems — all while complying with GDPR, Dutch healthcare data regulations, and NEN 7510 security standards. The initial target was 500 concurrent consultations, with capacity to scale to 5,000.
Architecture Decisions
Sytac designed the platform on a cloud-native architecture using Azure, with end-to-end encryption for all patient communications. Video infrastructure was built on WebRTC with a TURN server relay for network reliability across diverse patient connection conditions. The EHR integration used HL7 FHIR APIs, enabling structured health data exchange without vendor lock-in.
Reliability Engineering for Clinical Use
Healthcare platforms carry human consequences when they fail. The team implemented active-active multi-region deployment with automatic failover, circuit breakers on all external integrations, and graceful degradation that prioritised ongoing consultations over new session creation during overload. Chaos engineering exercises validated failure modes before go-live.
First Year Outcomes
The platform launched on schedule and onboarded 100,000 patients in its first year. Platform availability exceeded 99.95%. Patient satisfaction scores for telemedicine consultations matched in-person visit scores for the first time. The clinical team reported that secure messaging reduced phone call volume by 40%, freeing staff time for direct patient care.
Other Stories.
See all cases
We'd love
to help.
