Providing High-Quality Healthcare to Millions of People

How do you make high-quality healthcare more accessible and affordable in a country with 270 million people? This was the challenge that Alodokter, a Jakarta-based start-up, aimed to solve when it launched its online healthcare platform in Indonesia.

The fourth most populated country has far fewer doctors per capita than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. As a result, many people don’t have access to reliable sources of care, especially those who live in remote areas where access to nearby hospitals and clinics is limited.

Determined to overcome these barriers and improve the health of Indonesians, Alodokter Founder and CEO Nathanael Faibis launched the Alodokter app and website where people can connect with healthcare professionals and make appointments.

“Healthcare should be affordable and easy to manage for all,” says Faibis. “Everything we do is focused on delivering better patient outcomes, regardless of where they live or how much they earn. People living in the middle of the city or the farthest reach of our country all deserve access to quality medical care.”

Alodokter users can search for a suitable hospital, browse the latest health articles, and take advantage of health insurance offered by Alodokter. They can even order medicine prescribed by their doctor and have it delivered to their front door in just a few hours.

The Indonesian landscape is an archipelago, which can make network access difficult. As the number of Alodokter users entered the millions, it became apparent that the platform needed a new content delivery network (CDN) partner — one with a wide-ranging presence in Indonesia to help overcome slow page-loading times and prevent other interruptions to the user experience.

The team at Alodokter found that Akamai was best positioned to solve these challenges. “Once we’d looked at all the providers, it was clear that they couldn’t compete with Akamai in terms of cooperation with the main ISP networks in Indonesia,” says Kiagus Arief Adriansyah, CTO at Alodokter.

These partnerships underpin Akamai’s Edge DNS service, which provides a fast and consistent experience for people using the Alodokter app or website, even in the most remote locations. The sheer number of Akamai DNS servers in Indonesia also means that Alodokter’s website traffic rarely leaves the country, which gives greater control of data security and privacy.

Working with Akamai enabled Alodokter to scale up its service quickly. In 2020, platform usage tripled as people wanted reliable information about COVID-19 and to discuss their symptoms with doctors. “Akamai alerted us to the potential impact of the pandemic, and with their help we were able to expand the service without interruption,” Adriansyah says.

The Alodokter patient–doctor chat service is one area that benefited greatly from those performance improvements. In the past, the Alodokter monitoring team noticed that patients would leave the service if there were delays when sending or receiving messages. Now, with Akamai, they get far quicker responses — whether they are browsing in a city or from a remote island — and only end the session once their questions have been answered.

When Alodokter launched its new pharmacy service, it knew that any spike in demand wouldn’t affect the overall customer experience. This stable and consistent experience opens the door for Alodokter to confidently introduce new features and services.

Adriansyah recognizes how the Akamai team goes beyond its service-level agreements to support Alodokter. In addition to scheduled reports, Akamai sends impromptu updates based on bandwidth usage, potential threats from malicious traffic, and other important metrics.

“Akamai is more like a strategic partner than a service provider,” says Adriansyah. “It really lightens the load for our technology team and enables us to take a more active role in the business beyond constantly checking network performance.”

In the future, Alodokter plans to integrate with hospital systems to deliver a more consistent experience, with a shift from online appointments to also facilitating face-to- face appointments. But this will require confidential patient data to be fully protected from unauthorized access. “Every hospital has its own platform, so you need sophisticated API management and the highest levels of data security,” says Adriansyah. “But everything I’ve seen so far suggests that Akamai can play a central role as we develop this feature.”

Ultimately, using Akamai technology has enabled Alodokter to continue building trust between the people of Indonesia and the healthcare system. “In addition to supporting the delivery of care and information, Akamai helps ensure that we deliver a consistent, fast experience on computers and mobile devices,” he says. “It’s not just helping improve engagement with our app, it’s improving engagement with healthcare. You can’t put a value on that.”