Getting access to healthcare isn’t easy. There’s limited availability, bureaucratic red tape, exorbitant costs and systems that too often prevent patients from getting the care they need, when and where they need it.
Updoc set out to change that.
The Australia-based digital healthcare platform connects patients with AHPRA-registered doctors 24/7, enabling consultations, prescriptions, referrals, and advice, all online.
With a mission to reshape the future of healthcare for Australians (and partner doctors) Updoc was ready to enable safer, smarter, and more personal care.
But before they could go about it, the company’s founders had to tackle a more immediate challenge: turning a great theoretical idea into a real, working business.
Without the benefit of an engineering team in place, they needed the necessary software solutions to launch quickly, validate their idea, and begin serving patients right away.
Using Jotform – along with a flexible Stripe integration – Updoc was able to accelerate from an idea to a leading telehealth platform, all without sacrificing reliability or trust.
Updoc case study results at a glance
1,000,000+ patient consultations
Jotform Enterprise & Stripe helped Updoc amass 1MM+ patient consultations across Australia (and expansion into the UK)
20,000+ applications
Tens of thousands of conditional logic based doctor application workflows facilitated in Jotform
$1,000,000s
Millions of dollars transacted through Stripe, representing wider healthcare access for Australians
Launching a healthtech platform without infrastructure, or room for error
Updoc was built to solve a systemic issue: healthcare access in Australia wasn’t fast, flexible, or most importantly, patient-centered. Long wait times and rigid systems meant patients often couldn’t get care when they needed it. The consumer need was proven, for the right business.
At the same time, co-founders Cliffe Hodgkinson and Dylan Coyne faced a fundamental challenge for startups: how to go from idea to functioning business with limited budget and engineering resources.
They quickly realized that the first step toward building their telehealthcare platform wasn’t going to be writing code, it would be capturing information and enabling payments effectively.
“When you’re starting a business, everything becomes real the moment the first customer fills something out and pays,” said Hodgkinson.
The need to source the right data collection and secure/compliant payment tech solution was of particular importance. Those solutions would be relied upon for downstream business essentials, like handling sensitive patient data across stakeholders and managing dynamic workflows between patients, doctors, and internal teams.
Additionally, proper healthcare compliance meant supporting a large volume of medical applications and the data flexibility to move between one-off consultations and subscription-based care models for everyone involved.
“Healthcare is quite a complicated system,” mentioned Hodgkinson. “You need to get information from patients that needs to be passed on to a complicated set of workflows.”
Powering healthcare workflows and payments from a single, flexible platform
The need to capture structured information from patients and caregivers initially led Hodgkinson and Coyne to Jotform. And the need to take payment led them to the Stripe integration within the platform. Hodgkinson explained how the combination of the two solutions sped their ability to go from “idea” to “someone paid us” without needing engineers, infrastructure, or long build cycles.
“That speed was the difference between a side project and a real company. We have tested a number of startup ideas over the past 10 years and the combination of Jotform and Stripe have been there when we needed to make it real.”
How Jotform powers Updoc
Updoc uses Jotform to handle patient-facing, caregiver-facing and internal operations simultaneously. Detailed patient intakes for medical requests are routed to doctors, while at the same time, tens of thousands of doctor applications – dynamically built with if/then conditional logic to optimize retention and patient/doctor matching – flow in. Underlying it all are forms that help Updoc move data between internal teams and their tech stack.
“It’s (Jotform) the fastest way for us to move data across the organisation from patients to doctors, doctors back to patients and internally between teams,” confirmed Hodgkinson. “And whenever we need something new (feature wise), it’s usually already there.”
Scaling payments and revenue with Stripe
While Jotform powers data collection and workflows, the Stripe integration underpins Updoc’s financial infrastructure. When Updoc discovered Jotform, they knew they also needed a no-code payment solution that would be equally as secure, compliant, and scalable.
Stripe delivered that immediately.
The flexibility of Stripe’s solutions allowed Updoc to focus on healthcare delivery and product quality instead of worrying about data collection, payment edge cases, compliance or payment security.
Over the years, Stripe has enabled Updoc to facilitate
- One-off payments for individual consultations
- Subscriptions for ongoing, unlimited healthcare access
- Payout management via Stripe Connect
- Billing and revenue recognition for financial accuracy
- Reporting and reconciliation via Stripe Sigma
- Identity verification to support compliance
The payment platform’s features kept pace with Updoc as their business grew, eliminating the need to re-platform as demand and complexity increased. Overall, this allowed Updoc to support both transactional and subscription-based care models — a key differentiator in the healthcare space.
Updoc’s growth was so noticeable in fact that Stripe co-founder, Patrick Collison, reached out to Hodgkinson and Coyne for a fireside chat concerning the future of payments and healthcare.
“We allow patients to transact as a single consultation, or they can join our subscription product…Stripe allows us to manage both. It underpins our entire commercial layer, essentially every financial interaction in the business,” said Hodgkinson.
Delivering healthcare to millions in a fast, flexible and reliable way
Updoc went from an idea to being a leading telehealth platform with the help of Jotform and Stripe.
Together, the software solutions enabled Hodgkinson and Coyne to bootstrap Updoc from zero to over one million consultations between patients and doctors, whether the need be prescriptions, referrals, mental health services, or otherwise.
As a result, since 2021 the company has seen millions of transaction dollars flow through their platform without concern as to questions around volume or scale. Additionally, the service has been able to effectively qualify tens of thousands of doctor applications to identify the right healthcare professionals for the right patients.
From a general business standpoint, the software workflows helped the startup support one-off and subscription healthcare model types, expand into new business offerings (and the UK), and future-proof their platform without having to reconfigure the tech stack.
Operationally, the Jotform and Stripe foundation shrank typical development cycles and allowed them to iterate on business ideas, turning them into products in days instead of months. Hodgkinson agreed that their team can experiment on the pricing, subscription and services side based on data trends and feel confident that their workflow will seamlessly support their ideas.
“Updoc is Australia’s leading telehealth provider, in Australia, and we’ve been able to get to where we are today because of Jotform Enterprise and Stripe.”
Jotform Enterprise and Stripe enabled Updoc to move fast, stay flexible, and scale confidently in a highly regulated industry, powering both the launch and long-term growth of the business.
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