Verto

Verto Health uses Cloudflare Waiting Room to ensure availability and access of COVID-19 vaccine scheduling

Verto Health is a Canadian-based digital health company working to eliminate the silos of patient data that exist within the healthcare ecosystem. Its Digital Twin technology is designed to organize patients’ healthcare data around care journeys and the patients themselves, as opposed to provider environments. This technology ensures that healthcare providers have the best possible information when treating a patient.

Challenge

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Verto Health’s customers requested their help in managing COVID-19 testing and vaccine appointments. Their patient-centered platform is ideal for tracking the patient journey through a multi-stage process, such as undergoing a COVID-19 test before travel or scheduling multiple vaccine appointments.

Currently, Verto Health serves 10% of Canada’s population and 20% of Ontario’s. This means that even if a small percentage of their customers attempted to sign up for a test or an appointment, they could easily overload the system. To maintain customer trust, Verto Health needed a platform that was both highly available and secure.

Waiting Room ensures COVID-19 vaccine scheduling availability and security

Verto Health had previous experience working with Cloudflare. According to Yousaf Cheema, CISO at Verto Health, “We used the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall, and it was a simple but effective interface, and it was highly available. Once we turned it on, we were able to trust it to run smoothly without interference.”

When Verto Health was moving into the COVID-19 vaccination scheduling space, their team read about Project Fair Shot, a new Cloudflare initiative. Project Fair Shot provides free access to Cloudflare Waiting Room for organizations providing COVID-19 vaccination registration. The ability to put visitors into a queue provided the protection that Verto Health needed for its backend infrastructure. Cloudflare Waiting Room also provided much-needed flexibility and deployment speed. Cheema says, “We wanted a flexible solution because most of our clients will sign a contract and go live within two days. Cloudflare Waiting Room was able to provide us with that speed.”

COVID-19 testing and vaccination scheduling creates sudden surges in traffic to Verto Heath’s site. According to Cheema, “A lot of our clients are tweeting that there's a number of vaccination slots available. They have a certain demand and supply of vaccines and they want to make sure they maximize that as well, so there's less waste. That would cause huge surges. We wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t go down.”

In one month, Verto Health’s sites saw over 66 million requests and 1 million unique visitors. Cloudflare Waiting Room gave Verto Health the ability to manage the increased load. “It gave us so much flexibility during those stressful times when we saw the Waiting Room going for like an hour, two hours, because we were getting a significant surge in traffic. We were able to keep that on while we bumped up our infrastructure,” Cheema says. “Cloudflare Waiting Room gave us the time to not be fire fighting but focus on fine-tuning and optimizing instead.”

Verto Health looks toward the future

At first, Verto Health used a couple of Waiting Rooms to support COVID-19 vaccination scheduling sites. Now, it is a critical part of their ability to serve healthcare organizations and their patients. According to Michael Millar, CEO at Verto Health, “Our relationship with Cloudflare went from ‘Let's try Waiting Room’ to ‘Unless you have this, we're not going live with that public facing site.’ Our solution is all about patient relationship management, so, as we expand with hospitals, it is going to be part of our default recommendation to them and how they deal with their security stance for opening up their surfaces to the community.”