Over the last few years of helping clients with their telehealth businesses, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the technology that they are built on. Choosing what platform your business will run on is one of the most consequential for telehealth providers. Do you go with an existing SaaS platform, build your own solution from scratch, or try to land somewhere in the middle?

Starting from scratch of course gives you the ultimate control, but the infrastructure is complex, much more so than say a regular eCommerce site. There’s a lot you need to make work together before you can even focus on what will make your business stand out. Pre-qualification, patient intake, medical record management, doctor consultations, prescription management, pharmacy fulfillment, billing, reporting, and identity verification all have to be part of your system to perform the minimum functionality of providing telehealth. Then there are the things you probably need as a business, like connecting your CRM, preferred payment processor, marketing platforms, analytics tools, and third-party services.

Traditional SaaS telehealth platforms solve part of the problem, but your business will have to work within the confines of that platform’s frontend, workflows, integrations, provider ecosystem, and many other limitations.

It’s a simple gap, and one I believe many of our clients found as well: Why should they have to choose between a completely custom platform and building their business on top of someone else’s walled garden?

A Proof of Concept

When working on our client projects, our teams at CodeClouds kept repeatedly solving some of the same problems. Despite each telehealth business our clients had been different, there were still core technology problems that could be solved more cheaply for our clients by solving them once and using them in the future.

Our first solution to this problem was called Unify Framework for Healthcare. It was an internal development framework that allowed our teams to reuse the common parts you need in a custom telehealth project. The difference was a significant savings in development hours as well as accelerated project timelines, going from months to weeks.

This ended up being a proof of concept for AsterMD. If our development team benefitted from having a reusable telehealth platform foundation, wouldn’t other development teams?

Creating a Headless Telehealth Platform

The core concept of AsterMD is that a telehealth company shouldn’t have to redesign its business because the software doesn’t support a particular provider, pharmacy, payment processor, or really any other component they needed to change. Nor should they have to completely ditch or redevelop their platform around a change like that in the future. The architecture of the platform should support that in a modular way.

AsterMD does not dictate what a telehealth company’s patient experience should look like, instead it provides the underlying infrastructure to enable the company to build whatever experience they need on top. Pre-qualification, patient intake, identity verification, doctor consultations, prescription management, pharmacy fulfillment, medical record management and more are handled out of the box, and the developer integrating it can make the decision on what to change and what to use.

There’s the No-Code Intake Builder to easily create a custom patient intake process and a secure portal for patients to access information. AsterMD also comes with reporting and analytics as well as automations for email, SMS, and WhatsApp along with marketing and event tracking integrations.

If you need to connect AsterMD to a different doctor network that’s not included, fulfillment provider, CRM, payment processor, marketing platform, internal application, or another custom component, the architecture makes it possible. Of course many commonly needed services are already available through AsterMD’s Partner Network and Integrations, but when something isn’t, the API-first approach makes adding it considerably easier.

This is the missing middle option I described before. You don’t have to start from scratch, in fact most of the hard work is done for you, but you don’t have the restrictions of a typical SaaS platform. It’s an all-in-one platform designed to cover your patient experience end-to-end, but it’s not one-for-all.

Accelerated LegitScript Certification

Technology isn’t the only problem you have to solve when launching your telehealth platform. Certification and compliance are big time investments as well. CodeClouds is a LegitScript partner, which means they can assist customers with their certification process. Clients using our development services can get their certification expedited and have a reduced fee for their first year of certification.

Pursued independently, this process can take months, but through a LegitScript partner like CodeClouds it can be done much faster, often in weeks. For a startup, the reduced time to market waiting on certification can be just as important as the cost savings of less development time.

Why AsterMD Has a Free Beta Period

At this stage, the best way for CodeClouds to improve AsterMD is to get it in the hands of as many real telehealth businesses as possible to solve those edge cases you simply cannot predict internally.

Real companies have unique provider relationships, treatments, funnels, and fulfillment processes. They also have unique technology stacks, ranging from unique in a good way to unique because they’re made with zip-ties and duct tape. We can build for every ideal predictable setup, but technology in the real world is unpredictable and is built on the latter quite often.

We need all of those to solve the problems we haven’t encountered before.

During the beta, qualifying telehealth companies can use AsterMD free for up to six months. In that time, companies that take advantage of this offer are helping us expose and solve what parts of the platform still need improvement.

What If You Need Custom Development Too?

Being API-first means companies can handle implementation internally, but not everyone will want to do that, or have the talent internally even if they did want to, especially if they’re a startup. You might want AsterMD to be the foundation of a new custom patient experience.

CodeClouds is here to help. Our teams can handle the integration of the platform as well as any custom development work you need to get your setup exactly how you envision it. For the integration itself, we’re offering a discounted rate for AsterMD beta participants, and for the custom work, we’re very confident in our telehealth development experience. We made a whole platform because we did it so much after all.

Join the AsterMD Beta

If you’re a telehealth startup, or are upgrading your existing technology, you can fill out the Free Beta form on the AsterMD website. Our team will get in touch to learn more about what you’re building, discuss how AsterMD could fit into your technology stack, and figure out if your project is a good fit for the beta, and for that matter AsterMD itself.