About the Client
Cornerstone Health is an Australian healthcare provider — a primary- and urgent-care clinic network headquartered in Sydney, with more than 20 clinics across the country. Caring for patients every day, the organization runs two patient-facing mobile apps: an in-clinic app for appointments, documents, and on-site flows, and a telemedicine app for remote care.
Apps this central to clinical operations cannot be allowed to stall — but Cornerstone Health needed more engineering capacity to keep them stable, shipping, and improving. They turned to SCIMUS for embedded engineering support, and the relationship began the way the best ones often do: with a problem solved fast. On an early call, the app wasn’t building for the App Store; SCIMUS joined a live debugging session and resolved it on the spot. That moment set the tone for a long-term partnership.
Critical Apps, Slow to Fix and Tied to a Vendor
- For a clinic network, a mobile app is not a convenience — it is part of the care workflow. When something breaks or needs changing, the speed of the fix has real operational consequences. Yet Cornerstone Health’s release process worked against them: every build was manual, and every small fix had to travel through a full app-store cycle and wait for users to update, leaving a painful lag between discovering a problem and resolving it for patients.
- Beneath the delivery friction sat a bigger, strategic risk. A meaningful part of the product — membership, admin, and several API flows — was owned and controlled by a third-party vendor. That dependency made changes harder, maintenance riskier, and left Cornerstone Health unable to fully own their own roadmap. Their goal was to steadily move onto their own platform and regain control.
- Key challenges included:
- 1. An app that wouldn’t build. At the outset, the mobile app wasn’t building for the App Store at all — an immediate blocker to shipping anything.
- 2. Manual, error-prone releases. Each release meant generating iOS and Android builds by hand and pushing them out manually — slow, repetitive, and easy to get wrong.
- 3. Slow time-to-fix. Without over-the-air updates, even a tiny change required a full store release and user updates — days between a fix and its arrival on a patient’s phone.
- 4. Vendor dependency. Core membership, admin, and API functionality lived with a third-party vendor, limiting control and making the roadmap harder to execute.
- 5. A growing feature roadmap. Alongside stability, the apps needed new patient journeys — online prescriptions, first-available-doctor booking, in-clinic queue visibility — built reliably and on time.
Stabilize, Accelerate, and Modernize — Continuously
SCIMUS embedded a dedicated team into Cornerstone Health’s engineering group to keep the apps stable and shipping — first fixing what was broken, then automating releases, speeding up fixes, delivering new patient features, and steadily replacing a third-party vendor with the client’s own platform.
The work began with recovery. Resolving the build failure on that first live call got the product moving again and established the trust on which everything else was built. From there, SCIMUS operated as an embedded part of the team, taking direction from Cornerstone Health’s priorities and owning each piece end to end — mobile, backend, and the release pipeline alike.
What we delivered:
- TestFlight distribution streamlined through automated builds
- Automated CI/CD pipeline for iOS and Android releases
- CodePush enabled instant over-the-air JavaScript updates
- Force-update system added for critical native app changes
- New prescription, booking, appointment, and document flows
- iOS Live Activity shows patients their real-time queue position
- Vendor APIs and admin tools rebuilt to restore client ownership
The Team of Success
A duly-designed — meaning cost-efficient and result-oriented — team was assigned to the project
How We Work
