Halodoc achieves 40% improvement on app performance

Indonesia-based healthcare company, Halodoc, was founded in 2016 to solve a major problem for Indonesians: there are only three doctors for every 10,000 people, despite having a population of more than 270 million in the archipelago. This lack of qualified healthcare professionals is compounded by the fact that doctors aren’t always based in the locations where they are most needed.

Halodoc’s secure health-tech platform fills a gap in the market by connecting millions of patients with licensed doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurance providers and labs on a single platform which can be accessed by a mobile or web application. Its innovative technology, nimble nature, and patient-focused approach deliver a host of services, such as 24/7 doctor teleconsultation via chat, voice, or video, prescriptions, medical purchase and delivery, and lab services at home.

Delivering life-saving health technology

A cloud-native business, Halodoc adopted New Relic over six years ago, and has been increasing its adoption since 2020 in order to provide better platform reliability support.

While the business was enjoying steady growth, COVID-19 changed life as we know it and the demand for virtual health services exploded during this time. The technology team needed to deliver the best possible customer experiences with uptime and reliability, all while managing increased system load.

Halodoc’s Lenish Namath, Vice President of Technology, Cloud Infrastructure, SRE & Security, has used New Relic for 12 years in total across multiple organisations, and says that the Halodoc team leaned on the platform to successfully support 20 million+ monthly active users.

“During the pandemic, the number of transactions doubled every day, and by using New Relic, we were able to analyse data to see which parts of the systems were underutilised, allowing us to serve more customers with the same amount of infrastructure. It helped save lives,” says Lenish Namath, Vice President of Technology, Cloud Infrastructure, SRE & Security at Halodoc.

“If our platform is down, we can’t help people who need vital medical assistance. Thankfully, New Relic gives Halodoc a high level of observability across our infrastructure and allows us to find and fix issues before they escalate,” says Lenish.

Creating greater visibility into end-user experiences

With end-to-end visibility via New Relic dashboards and distributed tracing, Halodoc has been able to track its performance against KPIs, while consolidating and optimising its infrastructure usage.

“Halodoc is very focused on user experience and service availability and New Relic allows us to find bottlenecks and take quick corrective action. This has supported our growth during the last three years and has gone a long way to determining future capacity,” says Lenish.

The customisation available in New Relic has been particularly helpful to Halodoc, with the business leveraging custom reporting to analyse historical performance data. Real-time and historic insights allow for the periodic analysis of past performance, load, and throughput to understand current and future capacity needs.

“The visibility that the New Relic platform provides is significant as we are able to respond to our environment very quickly,” Lenish says.

“Its flexible nature allows us to slice and dice important data based on our specific needs, which has helped reduce our mean time to acknowledge, mean time to respond to production issues and we have kept our mean time to resolution to a minimum. This has a direct bearing on our user experience. When an issue occurs, we can address it quickly and prevent user churn."

Bolstering developer productivity

Halodoc is able to deliver consistent service availability thanks to sourcing real-time data from a single source of truth. This has not only reduced page load times, but has also created happier customers.

“New Relic has helped us focus on reducing our error page load times and API response time based on our internal thresholds. This has helped us maintain our service availability numbers and, in turn, led to customer happiness and an excellent rating. We have a Google Play store rating of 4.7 and an Apple App Store rating of 4.6,” Lenish explains.

By having all the necessary information about its systems in one place, Lenish’s team is delivering a consistent experience to its customers, and as a result Halodoc has created a culture of developer productivity, accountability and ownership.

Teams are using additional capacity to develop new features for its platform, with access to data being streamlined for engineering and non-engineering teams alike. This data democratisation has helped break down silos and create greater customer satisfaction.

Deploying New Relic has also enabled Halodoc to complete its DevOps transformation. It has gained greater velocity and helped it achieve continuous delivery. In terms of future plans, Halodoc is set to consolidate its logs via New Relic log management.

Doing more with less

As tech winter continues and more organisations look to cut costs and save on their bottom line, Halodoc has created a strong understanding of the most relevant data to support business decisions and uncover savings and efficiencies.

Since partnering with New Relic, Halodoc has achieved a 40% improvement in app performance alongside 20% in savings on infrastructure and associated server costs, in conjunction with the introduction of the AWS Graviton2 processors which are running 90% of its production workloads.

Between March 2022 and 2023, Halodoc’s average transaction numbers grew by 22%, while it made savings through vendor consolidation, service optimisation and a reduction in infrastructure costs.

“Thanks to New Relic, we decreased our monthly infrastructure costs by 20% between March 2022 and March 2023,” Lenish says.

“The level of service we provide in Indonesia is only possible because we have New Relic. We have always been impressed with the promptness and speed of responsiveness from the team.”