Midnight Health Improves Access to Care and Accelerates New Product Development on AWS

Midnight Health is on a mission to democratize healthcare across Australia. Its comprehensive digital platform is designed to simplify patient experiences, enhance accessibility, and improve health outcomes. Midnight Health provides telehealth consultations, weight loss solutions, medication delivery, and pharmaceutical services through four brands: hub.health, which caters to families; Youly, which offers women’s healthcare; Stagger, a digital healthcare service for Australian men; and hubPass for business, a membership-based telemedicine program.

Nic Blair, founder and chief executive officer at Midnight Health, says, “We’re building a complete health ecosystem to manage the healthcare needs and preventative health needs of all Australians. We've helped more than 200,000 customers to date, and we've done over 300,000 consultations through our platform.”

From the beginning, Midnight Health knew it needed to base its platform on a scalable, fast, highly available, and secure cloud. Colin McCririck, chief technology officer at Midnight Health, explains, “We knew that being on the cloud would provide the flexibility to get to market quickly and scale with each stage of the business. Speed is a major competitive advantage, but we also needed a highly available environment to ensure patients and clinicians have secure, round-the-clock access to our services.”

To achieve its goals, Midnight Health chose AWS as its cloud technology provider. “We chose AWS from day one because it provides the ideal combination of scalability, fast time to market, reliability, and robust security services,” says McCririck.

Launched in late 2020, the digital platform supporting hub.health, Youly, and Stagger runs on  AWS services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, with back-end servers running in Docker containers in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). To protect against common web exploits, Midnight Health uses AWS Fargate to run an autoscaling cluster and relies on AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF).

As a result, hub.health, Youly, and Stagger provide patients with reliable, round-the-clock remote access to an Australian medical team. Patients can receive diagnosis and treatment prescriptions through telehealth sessions, arrange home-delivered prescriptions, and obtain medical certificates through email. These brands collectively offer consultations and scripts for over 2,000 medications, covering gender-specific healthcare needs and treatments for various health concerns, including weight management, skin conditions, sexual health, and sleep issues.

Midnight Health is taking advantage of the reliability and high availability of AWS to ensure people in all parts of Australia have anytime, anywhere access to critical healthcare services. “A lot of data suggests that people in regional and remote areas can experience longer wait times for doctors and lower access to medication supply,” says McCririck. “By running the Midnight Health platform on AWS, we’re proud to say we’re improving access to care in remote regions across Australia.”

The company also has the flexibility to scale clusters on demand, which accelerates time to market for new features and products. “In the last year, we pushed new features into production 20 to 30 times a day and we released a new product nearly every month,” says McCririck. One of those new products is hubPass for Business, a monthly primary care health subscription for large organizations that provides unlimited telehealth services for employees. “hubPass will be a key solution for us, because it’s not common for Australian employers to fund access to primary care and telehealth consultations,” says Blair. “This will help us differentiate our business and reach new customers throughout Australia.”

Midnight Health is now exploring the use of AI technologies on AWS to enhance its capabilities. For instance, the company is evaluating AWS HealthScribe to improve clinician efficiency by automatically generating clinical notes. Says McCririck, “By using AWS AI services, we believe we can gain an additional competitive edge in the future while providing better healthcare access to Australians everywhere.”