Health is the most important aspect of our lives. As medical ratings and websites can be backed by commercial entities, it’s hard to treat them as a reliable healthcare information source.
DoveMed aims to be a trusted online resource that provides healthcare seekers and providers with the highest quality medical information on a platform that is easy-to-use, by anyone, anytime.
The biggest challenges of this project are dynamically changing goals and roadmaps.
4 years ago, DoveMed was launched as a blogging site with medical articles. Today it’s one of the largest medical portals in the USA in terms of monthly traffic.
All because the DoveMed team is dedicated to adjusting to rapidly changing users needs and progress in medicine.
This 4-year journey required a balance between creating features from client requests and building the best architecture and infrastructure to support product pivots and future roadmaps.
Solutions
To achieve these goals, we had to change our approach to this project and think of it more as an experiment that requires extra creativity (and extra orderliness) from our team. To make sure these goals were reached, we proposed and implemented a cutting-edge approach to system architecture.
Kubernetes
As the number of users (and features) rapidly grew, we decided to move the whole service to Kubernetes. It allowed the site to easily cope with increased traffic, new technological expectations and maintained high availability and immunity to breakdowns.
Ephemeral environments
Kubernetes (and a bit of our own magic) allowed us to implement ephemeral environments – a solution that lets the client test, review and observe the product and it’s improvements in a flexible, easy way. It also highly improved the efficiency of our development work by allowing each feature to be developed and tested in an independent branch.
Results
11
Million users to date
6.3K
Hospitals
1.2
Million physicians listed
29.5K
Healthcare articles
Infrastructure as code
An infrastructure as code setup allows us to optimize the infrastructure, increase performance and reduce costs (ex. we cut around 40% of the AWS costs within DoveMed). This solution also made our DevOps team happy as it’s elegant, transparent and provides a single source of truth for all members of the team.
DocSearch mobile app
In collaboration with the DoveMed team, Tivix developed a React Native mobile app for DoveMed that lets users search physicians in over 200 different specialties, based on their location.
The physician profiles include contact details, areas of expertise, and patient reviews and ratings.
““Despite the numerous challenges that emerged throughout the project, Tivix built an incredibly complex platform. The website is well-structured, stable, and able to accommodate 500,000 users each month. More than 1.2 million physicians are registered on the site, and traffic is increasing by 15% each month.””