Quality healthcare hinges on logistics. From scheduling appointments with different providers to ensuring your medical records follow you from one provider to another, healthcare can be a maze of details and challenges. Telehealth has improved flexibility, but also made it complicated to decide when in-person visits for labs or exams are needed. It’s a confusing landscape for patients and healthcare providers alike. Doctolib, one of the fastest growing digital healthcare providers in Europe, streamlines communication and simplifies medical appointment booking, accelerating the industry's shift to digital by bringing patients and providers closer together.

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the traditionally analog and in-person healthcare sector's shift to telehealth, while the global vaccination drive introduced new levels of scheduling complexity. Doctolib rose to these challenges, expanding its product range and bolstering its engineering team to cater to its growing user base. From electronic health records to patient onboarding tools, Doctolib has built a comprehensive system for seamless patient-provider communication. 

As Doctolib’s team grew and it faced this heightened demand, its technological infrastructure suffered, and the company came to rely on a variety of disparate tools, each adding overhead and maintenance burdens. When this overhead became too cumbersome, Doctolib turned to GitHub’s platform to streamline its software stack and reduce the number of tools teams needed to manage.

Knowing GitHub is rolling out features that we can incorporate into our existing workflows, is reassuring. Having all our key features centralized on one platform is a game-changer.

Doctolib has relied on GitHub for code storage and version control since its inception in 2013. Over the years, as both companies have grown, Doctolib has not only benefited from GitHub's increasing individual product offerings but has also witnessed GitHub's evolution into a fully formed, unified platform. This comprehensive platform has consistently addressed many of the challenges Doctolib experienced with other providers.

"Knowing GitHub is rolling out features that we can incorporate into our existing workflows, is reassuring," comments Doctolib Engineering Manager, Julien Tanay. "Having all our key features centralized on one platform is a game-changer." Moreover, this centralization isn't just about tools—it also enhances collaboration. 

With GitHub Actions, Doctolib moved from the dark age of CI into a full renaissance. Suddenly, everyone understood its value and was keen to craft their own Actions.

Doctolib recently witnessed significant enhancements in developer engagement and workflow governance when the company adopted GitHub Actions for its CI/CD pipeline. Previously, a small group managed continuous integration solutions, leading to limited engagement among the company’s developers and few feeling empowered to get involved. Actions transformed this dynamic. "With GitHub Actions, Doctolib moved from the dark age of CI into a full renaissance." remarks Tanay. "Suddenly, everyone understood its value and was keen to craft their own Actions." Beyond fostering participation in CI/CD development, GitHub Actions has improved developer morale within Doctolib’s engineering teams, with excitement around the tooling encouraging discussion among teammates.

This improved developer experience not only benefited the existing workforce, but also accelerated recruiting, with prospective employees excited to work with the tooling. “Our developers actually wanted to use GitHub Actions. They were requesting the use of Marketplace Actions and for the first time at Doctolib, developers were writing CI,” says Tanay. Doctolib now automates almost all of their CI/CD on GitHub Actions and deploys three times daily. Issues like coding style enforcement, which once consumed their time, are now effortlessly resolved by GitHub Actions. This efficiency has freed up countless hours for the engineering team, allowing them to shift focus to other essential tasks.

Since adopting GitHub, Doctolib has significantly improved code reuse. GitHub Actions gave developers the autonomy to explore and experiment, emphasizing reusability. Developers can now suggest new workflows and, thanks to the company’s simple mono repository strategy, quickly receive a go/no-go on the feasibility of the proposed implementation. “Our monorepo strategy on GitHub Enterprise meant we were doing innersource by design. Developers have become even more confident when suggesting changes,” remarked Tanay. 

Going forward, Doctolib is looking to implement even more of GitHub’s offerings into its business. After a successful trial of GitHub Copilot garnered overwhelming support from included engineers, Doctolib are adopting it company-wide. “We believe that satisfaction is a strong contributing factor to developer enablement, and since Copilot improves how developers work and engineer satisfaction, we’re giving our entire team access to Copilot,” shares Doctolib’s Product Lead, Tony Mignot. Doctolib has found value in building its business on a platform that is innovating alongside it, ensuring that the tooling it provides to its developers is constantly evolving. 

All these advancements in developer collaboration, developer happiness, CI/CD pipelines, and reusability aren’t just about the technical accomplishments, they’re about the human element behind them. As Doctolib streamlines and improves its digital solutions, it also enhances countless patients’ lives. Each code revision, streamlined process, and hour saved in development translates into a more efficient and accessible healthcare experience for patients and providers alike.