Accolade Case Study

Customer Profile

Recognized by Forbes as one of the 25 most promising U.S. companies, Accolade offers innovative, personalized health and benefits solutions to employers and employees and their dependents. Providing a single point of entry to healthcare, Accolade uses a blend of compassionate advisors, clinical expertise and intelligent technologies to help members understand their benefits and use them efficiently. Accolade Health Assistants and Nurses provide personalized support and coordinate with providers to improve the member healthcare experience at all stages of health.

Business Challenge

Recognizing the value of messaging as a convenient way for members to communicate with Accolade Health Assistants and Nurses, the company adopted a third-party messaging solution in its mobile app. Accolade Mobile’s messaging feature aspired to maximize engagement, shaping the healthcare experience to be more efficient, compassionate, and accessible.

Unfortunately, Accolade’s original messaging solution did not offer the level of scalability and reliability the company required. Since messaging was an essential channel of communication for its business model, Accolade sought an in-app messaging service to meet its high product standards and projected growth. Migrating a messaging solution, however, is an inconvenient and tedious process. Immediately upgrading Accolade Mobile with an active user base would require significant down-time.

Accolade needed an in-app messaging service that could migrate all of its historical messaging data without down-time or data loss while members actively used the new messaging service. It needed to be reliable, low-latency, and secure enough to support HIPAA regulations.

Why Accolade Chose Sendbird

Accolade chose Sendbird’s technology to power its in-app messaging to meet all of its needs, from high-performance and reliability to security and HIPAA -compliance, so it can deliver a human Health Assistant to every pocket.

Sendbird directly supported Accolade’s secure migration from its old messaging solution, including hundreds of thousands of conversations and users and millions of messages. Accolade worked directly with Sendbird’s Solution Engineering and Customer Success teams to ensure a seamless transition to its new messaging solution without any down-time or data loss.

Since security is paramount to healthcare companies, Sendbird facilitated the entire migration using secure file transfer protocol (SFTP), deployed a dedicated instance for Accolade’s messaging traffic, and implemented single sign-on (SSO) with SAML. As partners protecting electronic protected health information, Accolade and Sendbird together signed a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), mutually committing to the stringent security required by HIPAA.

Using Sendbird’s proprietary infrastructure, Accolade experiences less latency for user messages and webhooks, which allows Accolade to build analytics on messaging events. Accolade was able to seamlessly build conversations into both its mobile application, using Sendbird’s iOS and Android SDKs, and the Health Assistant’s view, using the JavaScript SDK.

Results

Leveraging SendBird’s deep experience with messaging platforms, Accolade migrated its messaging within a month. From messages and channel creation to webhooks, Accolade experiences high performance, allowing it to focus on building great experiences. Ultimately, with SendBird’s HIPAA-compliant messaging, dedicated instances, and SFTP-enabled migration, Accolade feels confident with SendBird, allowing it to securely communicate with and deliver the best healthcare experience.

1) Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWSnative services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.