Case Study: THINKMD achieves rapid delivery of localized, offline-first frontline healthcare assessment apps with Heroku

THINKMD Delivers a Frontline Healthcare Assessment Platform on Heroku

THINKMD is a healthcare technology company founded by pediatricians to expand access to quality care in low- and middle-income countries where doctors are scarce. Its challenge was to deliver reliable, localized clinical assessment tools to frontline workers operating with intermittent or no internet, limited device storage and data, and strict medical-quality requirements — all with a small engineering team that needed to support rapid localization and regulatory-grade testing.

Using Heroku, THINKMD built an offline-first Vue.js progressive web app and a microservices back end with Heroku Postgres (including follower replicas), S3-based ingest and asynchronous processing, and Tableau for analytics. Heroku CI, Pipelines and Review Apps streamlined QA and regional reviews, while easy scaling enabled fast responses like a two-month rollout of a COVID‑19 track. The result: rapid, compliant regional deployments, wider reach (300,000+ users in Indonesia and availability across Africa), and measurable health impact — THINKMD estimates hundreds of child lives saved per 1,000 healthcare workers using the app.

ThinkMD

Alex Broussard

Chief Technology Officer