Empower

Appointment Booking System

Empower Health's seven year old appointment booking system was stuck in maintenance mode with no original developers left, as COVID forced a pivot to vaccination bookings. Ollon provided fractional CTO services, scaled the dev team as needs shifted, and introduced scrums, code review, and automated deployment. Empower Health met COVID demands and won new contracts with the Ontario Ministry of Health.

Situation

Toronto based Empower Health offers an appointment booking system connecting patients with medical clinics and pharmacies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the company pivoted to enable vaccination bookings, requiring major upgrades to a seven year old system that had been held in “maintenance mode” and could not support current needs.

Solution

Ollon provided fractional CTO services, augmented the dev team’s resources (scaling up and down as needs and deadlines shifted) as well as oversaw new hires. New internal systems were instituted including project management, weekly scrums, daily stand ups, tracking of work, automating deployment, and code reviews.

Results

Ongoing scalable support from Ollon enabled Empower Health to move forward with an enhanced product to meet the demands of Covid throughout its most challenging times. It also helped them win and meet deadlines for new contracts with the Ontario Ministry of Health and other healthcare providers.

Technologies

Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS

Our Expertise in Action

Application Triage and Rescue

Empower Health's appointment booking system had spent years in maintenance mode by the time COVID-19 hit, and the original development team was no longer with the organization to help it adapt. Ollon was brought in to take over a codebase that was seven years old, with no institutional knowledge behind it, at the exact moment the company needed to pivot the platform to handle vaccination bookings under shifting public health rules. Ollon assessed the system's condition instead of writing it off, then managed its evolution forward, rebuilding what was needed to meet urgent new requirements. That triage work gave Empower Health a platform that could keep pace with the pandemic instead of buckling under it.

Project Management

Empower Health's engagement with Ollon needed more structure than the legacy system had operated under for years. Ollon instituted new internal systems including formal project management, weekly scrums, daily standups, and consistent tracking of work across the team. This gave both Ollon and Empower Health visibility into priorities and progress as deadlines shifted quickly and often because of COVID. The added structure helped the team consistently meet deadlines for new contracts with the Ontario Ministry of Health and other healthcare providers.

Code Review and Design Review

Empower Health's booking system had been running without the process discipline needed to keep quality consistent once a new, unfamiliar team took it over. As part of stabilizing the platform, Ollon introduced code reviews into the team's regular workflow, alongside project tracking and automated deployment. This gave the team a consistent check on new work before it shipped, at a time when requirements and regulations were changing quickly. The added review discipline supported the reliability Empower Health needed to meet contractual deadlines with health authorities.

Hiring and Onboarding Support

As Empower Health's needs shifted rapidly during the pandemic, the company needed to grow its technical team without losing momentum. Ollon's fractional CTO oversaw new hires as part of the broader engagement, building out the team alongside its own augmented developers. This let Empower Health scale its development capacity up or down as deadlines and priorities changed, without the delays typically involved in hiring and onboarding technical staff internally.

Fractional DevOps Support

Empower Health needed its Ruby on Rails platform, running on AWS, to deploy reliably while rushing to add vaccination booking features under pressure. Ollon's fractional CTO engagement included automating deployment for the platform, removing a manual bottleneck at exactly the moment releases needed to move fast. This fractional support gave Empower Health infrastructure and deployment expertise without hiring a dedicated DevOps engineer, supporting a more dependable release process through the most demanding stretch of the work.

Managed Services and Application Monitoring

Once Empower Health's platform was stabilized and modernized, the relationship shifted into an ongoing maintenance phase that ran from August 2022 through November 2023. Ollon's continued, scalable support let Empower Health keep its booking system running reliably well beyond the initial rebuild prompted by COVID. That ongoing arrangement also helped the company win and meet deadlines for new contracts with the Ontario Ministry of Health and other healthcare providers.

Ruby on Rails

Empower Health engaged us to modernize their seven year old Ruby on Rails appointment booking system that connects patients with medical clinics and pharmacies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we rapidly developed new Ruby features to handle vaccination bookings, implementing custom scheduling logic and regulatory compliance features within tight deadlines. Our Ruby development work included building new booking workflows, updating database schemas, and creating API endpoints to support the Ontario Ministry of Health contract requirements and other healthcare provider integrations.