Curatech Case Study

Customer Profile

Curatech is one of the top telemedicine apps in Mexico, and a chat platform designed specifically for doctor-patient interactions. Based in Mexico City, Curatech gives more control to doctors to lead reliable and fair consultations while providing a safe and easy-to-use experience for patients. The company was founded in 2019 by an accomplished ex-Uber team, impressed by the dedication of doctors to their patients, and their commitment to improving health in Latin America.

Business Challenge

In Mexico, it is common for patients to request the WhatsApp number of their doctors and seek consultations and follow-ups directly within the app. However, due to the app’s social nature, medical interactions conducted in WhatsApp can be messy at best and abused at worst. Patients’ social conversations in WhatsApp become entangled with professional medical discussions, resulting in doctors relinquishing much control of their business due to informal, ad hoc consultations where they are not properly compensated. For this reason, doctors have wanted to migrate off of WhatsApp for years.

Furthermore, WhatsApp does not have nearly the level of compliance and security necessary to conduct any type of medical consultation. Sensitive patient information is constantly shared on the platform and left vulnerable as the service does not adhere to healthcare regulations.

Curatech followed these dynamics closely and sought to build a dedicated doctor-patient chat platform that was orderly, fair, and would reign back business and healthcare control to doctors instead of WhatsApp.

Why Curatech Chose Sendbird

With such a strong business and healthcare opportunity identified, Curatech was focused on bringing its application to market as quickly as possible. As a lean start-up, the company first considered developing its chat in-house. However, the team soon realized that while building some form of chat functionality may be feasible, “building and maintaining a great chat experience to scale would be the true challenge,” says Ricardo Carvallo, CEO and Founder of Curatech.

Features such as push notifications, image sharing, read receipts, group chats, and bots would require immense resources and time, significantly delaying bringing their MVP to market.

With these considerations in mind, and after an extensive evaluation process, Sendbird was selected based on its rich feature set, position in the market vs. competitors, deep customer reference base, and constant drive for innovation. Carvallo states that Sendbird “already dedicated all of those resources to have all the features we could potentially hope for in terms of offering a great chat experience to users. That’s why we chose Sendbird.”

Results

Since its launch, Curatech now has over 2500 doctors using its platform and more than 200,000 patients across Mexico booking appointments and receiving medical consultations within the app. Through chat, users can share images, request medical advice, and even receive prescriptions, which can be printed or filled directly at Curatech’s digital pharmacy.

Doctors are now assured proper compensation, and depending on the parameters they set, patients must enter their payment information before or after the first chat consultation. This creates a balanced model that provides certainty in the fair exchange of service.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Curatech decided to implement video calls as well, as the demand for remote appointments skyrocketed. Within two weeks, Curatech integrated Sendbird Video Calls into their platform, allowing for socially distant face-to-face meetings between doctors and patients.

Today, patients feel much more secure discussing medical topics through Curatech vs. WhatsApp. Sendbird is a HIPAA-compliant platform, and while Mexico may not be adherent to HIPAA, this still served as a strong assurance for Curatech’s data security. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Curatech, 94% of patients affirm that they would stop communicating on WhatsApp and use a secure platform if their physician asked them to do so.

Together with Sendbird, Curatech is changing the landscape of how medicine and healthcare are conducted in Latin America, moving users to a safe, reliable, and fair digital platform.

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.