Harnessing the Power of DoiT: How Patients Know Best scaled to new heights amidst rapid growth
Meet Patients Know Best
Patients Know Best revolutionized digital medical records by creating the world’s first patient-controlled data system of record – commonly known as a ‘personal health record’, or PHR. The innovative platform combines data from hospitals, general practitioners, mental health providers, and patients into a single, real-time, unified record. This helps patients take charge of their health, allows physicians to be better informed and more efficient, and enables hospitals to reduce costs.
The Challenge
Founded in 2009, Patients Know Best grew steadily over its first decade, expanding from a few thousand to more than 100,000 users while collaborating with government partners such as the UK’s National Health Service.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic drove a sharp spike in care utilization and surging demand for electronic access to records. Patients Know Best’s platform quickly grew to three million users. Although the team grew from a half-dozen engineers to nearly 100, maintaining infrastructure amid fluctuating demand remained a challenge.
“We are the largest patient health record portal in the UK, and it’s more than ‘just’ 3 million users — it’s also the fact that we have multiple times more patient records than that,” says Mate Varga, Chief Technology Officer of Patients Know Best. “We have around 90 people on staff, and one-third of those are in engineering. We’re small and essentially a business-to-government company. As we grow, we are committed to building a robust infrastructure that ensures we also remain nimble and cost-efficient.”
In response to the data-management challenges of rapid growth, the company first migrated from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud. But it soon needed a better way to forecast and manage cloud capacity amid ongoing utilization spikes. That’s when an account manager suggested partnering with a reseller to optimize its Google Cloud infrastructure.
Varga was skeptical at first. “To be honest, the initial few resellers we encountered didn’t provide a distinct advantage compared to the direct offerings from Google,” he said. “That is, until we connected with DoiT. In addition to their customer support capabilities, what really convinced us of their value was that they offered an analytics dashboard — something we didn’t want to invest time and resources into developing ourselves.”
The Solution
DoiT began by evaluating Patients Know Best’s strengths and opportunities for improvement. One notable concern was the company’s broad scope of work, combined with manual processes and a relatively small staff, which limited its ability to manage periodic activity spikes.
“Monitoring and managing the sheer volume of events and logs within our system manually is impractical given the scale we now operate at,” Varga says. “My strategy was to rely more on automation and tooling, both on the security side and on the FinOps side — machine learning tools, anomaly detection, and other automation that doesn’t require much configuration or interaction from humans because the scarcest resource for us is people.”
So DoiT’s primary goal was to help the IT team scale through process automation and clearer reporting by leveraging its proprietary technology portfolio and three primary capabilities:
- Cloud Analytics: Provides visibility into cloud usage and spend, translating bills into business context to drive decisions.
- Real-Time Anomaly Detection: Continuously analyzes cloud billing data, alerting users to abnormal cost spikes and providing detailed analytics and reporting to accelerate investigation and remediation.
- BigQuery Lens: Provides actionable optimization recommendations and drill-downs into individual usage stats, reducing costs through better insights and faster decisions.
In the rare cases where automation couldn’t solve specific infrastructure problems, DoiT’s client services team provided additional expertise.
“It happens maybe once a month that we need to deal with more complex infrastructure challenges and have to bring human expertise in to manage the problem,” Varga says. “DoiT’s client services has been great, but overall, the automated dashboard has been more than enough to support our people.”
DoiT also helped Patients Know Best tackle two additional challenges: financial management and talent development.
From a financial perspective, Patients Know Best experienced occasional outliers in analytics spend due to unexpected usage spikes that required rapid scale-up. “These spikes in cost were hard to detect,” Varga says. “We knew automation could help, but our internal resources and time constraints prevented us from achieving the desired level of monitoring quality independently.”
To increase visibility, DoiT set up a business-intelligence dashboard with automated alerts for sudden fluctuations in query costs. “That helped us catch problems early, so we didn’t need to wait until the next monthly bill to figure out if we had misconfigured something,” Varga says.
DoiT also provided training and webinars to upskill the Patients Know Best team for stronger in-house cloud management and infrastructure maintenance.
The Results
Varga says the key benefit was DoiT’s technology itself, beyond excellent support and training, because the automated functions have been reliable and effective. DoiT has delivered the benefits of additional hiring, more efficiently and at lower cost.
Moreover, Patients Know Best has achieved smoother operations in general through working with DoiT. “While we don’t have the internal capacity and resources to measure and calibrate all the services we are using and to optimize our cloud usage, the DoiT technology does,” Varga says.
Going forward, Patients Know Best aims to explore the adoption of a unified billing system across all parts of their infrastructure. DoiT’s capabilities offer a pathway for the organization to make progress in this direction. Moreover, Patients Know Best has achieved smoother operations by working with DoiT.
“When you’re small, your infrastructure spending is often negligible compared to what you spend on people. As the infrastructure and the volume of data that we handle grows, the infrastructure spending is becoming more significant compared to all our other costs. We are at a level now where optimizing a more robust cloud infrastructure is really important.”