See how Heal.me transformed their appointment booking capabilities with calendar synchronization from Cronofy.

The problem:

Delivering reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale

Heal.me is a health and wellness platform based in Austin, Texas, with a mission to advance a new model of healthcare that is holistic, personalized, and proactive. Accurate calendars and streamlined appointment booking lie at the core of the company’s goal to connect users with vetted practitioners nearby or online. We speak with Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer at Heal.me, to hear the story of how discovering Cronofy’s API for calendar synchronization changed their organizational philosophy from building everything in-house and allowed their busy engineering team to focus on creating unparalleled user experience.

“We wanted to get more reliability in our calendar synchronization,” Chad explains the challenge his team was faced with. “We had some weird edge cases that were acting unexpectedly, and we wanted to increase the number of calendar services that we were synchronizing with.”

To Heal.me, building a reliable calendar offering was critical to the core product. “We have over 4,000 people on our network. We’re also a small team of a few developers building the product. When you have these calendar synchronization issues popping up all over the place, having to continuously deal with them becomes not only annoying, but distracts us from our core product.”

I came across Cronofy’s calendar synchronization API and thought—this is wild, we’re trying to do all of this ourselves, when there’s a tool that does this for us.

The solution:

Finding a HIPAA-compliant calendar sync solution without incurring the legal costs

After conducting interviews with churned power users, Heal.me came to the conclusion that solving these rogue calendar issues had to be at the top of their agenda. “It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this.”

Building in-house had been the strategy up until that point, but delivering this feature looked to be a challenge.

The sensitive nature of the data Heal.me processes means HIPAA compliance and data security was non-negotiable for the team. “Our primary customers are holistic care practitioners who deal with patients. To service this market, we have to maintain all of these different policies about how we’re handling their data. We thought, can we get HIPAA compliance faster, without having to incur all of the legal expenses?”

Being able to leverage Cronofy’s expertise and compliance instantly allowed Heal.me to move faster. “The fact that Cronofy was HIPAA compliant, and that we can get a HIPAA BAA (Business Associate Agreement) thanks to this was a huge bonus.”

Wasting time on calendar bugs becomes an annoyance when we have critical features that we need to build and get out. It makes sense to hand this over to somebody that specializes in it, rather than hire fifteen developers to focus on all the calendar integrations.

The result:

A scalable pricing model that has shaped how Heal.me solves engineering challenges

No longer having to spend time on time-draining calendar bug squashing has freed up the team to focus on delivering new and improved features. “Calendar bugs are no longer a headache for us. If there’s a serious issue with the calendar sync, we could just ask you guys to deal with it. As a small startup, that’s a huge relief.”

Saving development times on new integrations was a significant benefit, too.

A lot of our users were looking for iCal, iCloud, and Outlook support. Getting that right out of the box without needing to develop it ourselves was incredibly handy.

“Before, we were building everything internally. Now, we’ve shifted to keeping our engineering resources focused on the work that matters most to the end user,” speaks Chad on the change this project has brought to the leadership team. “I don’t think people were aware that this kind of thing was possible in the past. It’s allowing us to move faster by integrating these API services that take care of a lot of the compliance, security, and reliability needed for our service. It just makes sense.”

“When we saw that there were big players using the Cronofy API, it looked like it was going to work, but that it was going to cost a fortune,” explains Chad on concerns about long-term pricing when it comes to most APIs. “I was expecting a pricing model that would get us to an MVP, but that there would be no way to scale with it.”

Scaling with the startup discount enabled Heal.me to service their calendar synchronization with Cronofy on a long-term basis.

After the launch of the project, Heal.me is now focusing on scaling their practice management application. “We’ve become a product-led organization,” shares Chad. The company continues to focus their engineering resources on user experiences that matter most, all while delivering appointment scheduling they can rely on.