🏥 Healthcare

Telemedicine Platform

Client: Regional Health Network

50K+
Patients Served
99.9%
Uptime SLA
4.8/5
Patient Satisfaction
60%
Reduced Wait Times

Timeline

14 weeks from kickoff to production launch

Team

6 engineers (2 frontend, 2 backend, 1 DevOps, 1 QA)

Industry

Healthcare

The Challenge

Regional Health Network operated twelve outpatient clinics and two urgent care facilities spread across a 200-mile rural corridor. Patients routinely drove 45 minutes or more for routine follow-up appointments, prescription renewals, and specialist consultations. No-show rates hovered around 32 percent, costing the network an estimated $2.4 million annually in lost revenue and wasted provider time. For patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, gaps in care between in-person visits led to preventable emergency department visits and hospital readmissions.

The network had previously attempted to adopt a commercial telemedicine product, but the platform suffered from poor video quality on rural broadband connections, lacked integration with their existing Epic-based electronic health record system, and required patients to download a separate application that many older patients found confusing. Provider adoption stalled at under 15 percent after six months, and the project was shelved.

Beyond the technology failures, the organization faced strict regulatory requirements. All patient data had to remain within HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, video sessions needed end-to-end encryption, and the platform had to support audit logging for compliance reviews. The network also required e-prescribing capabilities that integrated with major pharmacy chains and a patient portal that could surface lab results, upcoming appointments, and care plan documents.

The executive team approached Cozcore with a clear mandate: build a telemedicine platform that works reliably on low-bandwidth connections, integrates natively with their EHR, and is simple enough for elderly patients to use without technical assistance. The system needed to be operational within four months to meet a state funding deadline tied to rural healthcare access grants.

Our Approach

We began with a two-week discovery phase that included shadowing physicians during patient consultations, interviewing front-desk staff about scheduling pain points, and conducting usability sessions with a group of 20 patients ranging in age from 28 to 84. This fieldwork revealed that the primary barrier to adoption was not technology resistance but rather workflow friction: patients did not understand how to prepare for a virtual visit, and providers lacked a streamlined way to document encounters within their existing EHR workflow.

Based on these insights, we designed an architecture that prioritized three principles: zero-download access via WebRTC in the browser, adaptive video quality that gracefully degraded on slow connections, and a provider experience that embedded directly within the Epic workflow through SMART on FHIR integration. Rather than asking providers to switch between applications, the telemedicine session launched from within the EHR and automatically populated encounter notes with visit metadata.

We adopted a phased delivery approach aligned with the funding deadline. Phase one delivered the core video consultation platform with scheduling, waiting room, and basic encounter documentation in eight weeks. Phase two added e-prescribing integration with Surescripts, lab result viewing, and the patient self-service portal over the following six weeks. Phase three, delivered post-launch, introduced asynchronous messaging, care plan management, and remote patient monitoring device integration.

Throughout development, we maintained a continuous feedback loop with a pilot group of four physicians and fifty patients. Bi-weekly demos allowed clinical stakeholders to validate that workflows matched real-world practice patterns. We also engaged the network compliance officer early, conducting two formal security reviews during development to ensure HIPAA requirements were addressed architecturally rather than retrofitted.

The Solution

The delivered platform consists of three primary components: a patient-facing web application optimized for mobile browsers, a provider-facing clinical interface embedded within Epic via SMART on FHIR, and an administrative dashboard for scheduling management, analytics, and compliance reporting.

The patient experience begins with an SMS or email appointment reminder containing a single-click link to join the virtual waiting room. No app download, no account creation for the first visit, and no complex setup. The WebRTC-based video engine automatically adjusts resolution and frame rate based on available bandwidth, maintaining acceptable quality even on 1.5 Mbps connections common in the rural service area. If video quality drops below usable thresholds, the system gracefully falls back to audio-only with a shared document viewer for lab results and care plans.

On the provider side, physicians launch the telemedicine session directly from the Epic schedule. The encounter note is pre-populated with patient demographics, active medications, recent lab results, and the reason for visit. During the consultation, providers can share their screen to walk patients through test results, annotate images, and generate e-prescriptions that are transmitted directly to the patient pharmacy of choice via Surescripts. After the visit, the encounter note is automatically filed to the patient chart with the video session duration, diagnosis codes, and any prescriptions issued.

The infrastructure runs entirely on AWS within a HIPAA-eligible environment. Video streams are encrypted end-to-end using SRTP, and all patient data at rest is encrypted with AES-256. The system implements role-based access control aligned with the network organizational hierarchy, and every data access event is logged to a tamper-proof audit trail. Automated monitoring through CloudWatch and PagerDuty ensures the operations team is alerted within 60 seconds of any service degradation.

Results & Impact

Measurable outcomes delivered for Regional Health Network

60% reduction in patient wait times

Average time from appointment booking to consultation dropped from 12 days for in-person visits to under 48 hours for telemedicine appointments. Urgent follow-up consultations were typically completed same-day, eliminating the multi-week delays that previously led to gaps in chronic disease management.

50,000+ patients served in first 12 months

The platform facilitated over 50,000 telemedicine encounters in its first year of operation, with adoption growing 18 percent month-over-month. Provider adoption reached 89 percent within three months of launch, compared to the 15 percent ceiling of the previous commercial solution.

99.9% platform uptime maintained

The AWS-hosted infrastructure delivered 99.9 percent uptime across the first year, with zero unplanned outages affecting patient care. Planned maintenance windows were conducted during off-hours with zero-downtime deployments using blue-green deployment strategies.

4.8 out of 5 patient satisfaction score

Post-visit surveys returned an average satisfaction score of 4.8 out of 5 across all patient demographics. Notably, patients over 65 rated the platform 4.7 out of 5, validating the accessibility-first design approach that eliminated app downloads and complex authentication flows.

$1.8M annual savings from reduced no-shows

No-show rates dropped from 32 percent for in-person appointments to 8 percent for telemedicine visits. The convenience of joining from home eliminated transportation barriers, childcare conflicts, and work schedule constraints that drove the majority of missed appointments.

Technology Stack

The technologies powering this solution

React

Frontend framework for the patient portal, provider interface, and administrative dashboard with component-based architecture enabling rapid feature development.

Node.js

Backend API server handling authentication, appointment scheduling, encounter management, and real-time WebSocket connections for the virtual waiting room.

WebRTC

Peer-to-peer video and audio communication with adaptive bitrate streaming, SRTP encryption, and graceful fallback to audio-only on constrained connections.

PostgreSQL

Primary relational database for patient records, appointment data, encounter notes, and audit logs with row-level security enforcing access control policies.

AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, CloudFront)

HIPAA-eligible cloud infrastructure providing auto-scaling compute, managed database, encrypted object storage for documents, and global CDN for static assets.

SMART on FHIR

Healthcare interoperability standard enabling seamless embedding of the telemedicine interface within the Epic EHR and bidirectional clinical data exchange.

Surescripts

E-prescribing network integration enabling providers to send electronic prescriptions directly to patient pharmacies during telemedicine encounters.

Redis

In-memory data store powering real-time session management, waiting room queues, and caching of frequently accessed patient summary data for sub-100ms response times.

Cozcore understood that this was not just a technology project but a fundamental change in how we deliver care to our community. Their team spent time in our clinics, talked to our patients, and built a system that our 70-year-old patients use as easily as our 30-year-old ones. The platform has become the backbone of our rural access strategy, and the quality of the engineering gives us complete confidence in its reliability and security.

Dr. Sarah Mitchell

Chief Medical Officer, Regional Health Network

Services Used in This Project

Explore the capabilities that made this project a success

Telemedicine Platform - Frequently Asked Questions

How did you ensure HIPAA compliance throughout the telemedicine platform?
HIPAA compliance was addressed at every layer of the architecture rather than treated as a checkbox exercise. At the infrastructure level, we deployed exclusively on AWS HIPAA-eligible services with a signed Business Associate Agreement. All data at rest is encrypted using AES-256, and data in transit uses TLS 1.3. Video streams are protected with SRTP end-to-end encryption. At the application level, we implemented role-based access control with the principle of least privilege, ensuring providers only access patient records relevant to their care relationships. Every data access event is logged to a tamper-proof audit trail that supports compliance reviews and breach investigations. We conducted two formal security assessments during development and engaged a third-party penetration testing firm before launch. The platform also implements automatic session timeouts, secure credential management through AWS Secrets Manager, and PHI-aware logging that redacts sensitive data from application logs.
How does the platform perform on low-bandwidth rural internet connections?
We designed the video engine specifically for the bandwidth constraints common in rural areas. The WebRTC implementation uses adaptive bitrate streaming that continuously monitors connection quality and adjusts video resolution, frame rate, and audio codec in real time. On a standard 5 Mbps connection, patients experience HD video at 720p and 30 frames per second. On connections as slow as 1.5 Mbps, the system automatically reduces to 480p at 15 frames per second while maintaining clear audio quality. If bandwidth drops below 500 Kbps, the platform gracefully transitions to audio-only mode with a synchronized document viewer that allows providers to share lab results and care plans over the low-bandwidth connection. We tested extensively on simulated rural network conditions using traffic shaping tools to validate quality under real-world constraints. The patient application is also optimized for mobile data connections, with the initial page load under 200 KB and lazy loading for non-critical assets.
How was the platform integrated with the existing Epic electronic health record system?
Integration with Epic was achieved through the SMART on FHIR standard, which allows third-party applications to launch within the EHR context and exchange clinical data through standardized APIs. When a provider opens a telemedicine appointment in Epic, the platform launches as an embedded application with full access to the patient clinical context including demographics, active medications, allergies, recent lab results, and the appointment reason. During the encounter, providers document directly within the telemedicine interface, and on session completion, the encounter note with diagnosis codes, prescriptions, and visit metadata is written back to the Epic patient chart via FHIR resources. This bidirectional integration eliminated the dual-documentation burden that killed adoption of the previous telemedicine solution. We worked closely with the network Epic team during a four-week integration sprint, using the Epic sandbox environment for development and conducting end-to-end testing with de-identified patient data before production activation.
What measures were taken to ensure the platform is accessible to elderly patients?
Accessibility for older patients was a primary design constraint validated through usability testing with patients aged 65 and older. We eliminated the requirement to download a mobile application by building the entire patient experience as a progressive web application accessible through any modern browser. Appointment reminders are sent via SMS with a single link that opens directly into the virtual waiting room with no login required for the first visit. The interface uses large touch targets meeting WCAG AAA guidelines, high-contrast text, and clear iconography with text labels. Font sizes default to 18px with an easily accessible size increase control. We avoided complex navigation patterns, limiting the patient interface to a maximum of two clicks from entry to live video session. Audio prompts guide patients through the connection process, and a pre-visit technology check verifies camera, microphone, and internet speed before the appointment time. The front-desk staff at each clinic were trained to walk patients through their first telemedicine experience over the phone if needed, reducing the adoption barrier to near zero.

Have a Similar Project?

Tell us about your project and get a free consultation with our senior engineers. We will show you how we can deliver results like these for your business.

NDA Protected | 100% Code Ownership | 24/7 Support for Active Clients