Case Study - Telehealth built in weeks, running six years later

Overview

When COVID-19 hit, general practices needed video consultations overnight. The consumer video tools available at the time weren't built for clinical use: patients had to install apps or create accounts, and doctors risked exposing their personal contact details with every call.

GP Consults was the purpose-built answer. Stacktrace worked with the GP Consults team to design and build the platform — launched quickly at the height of the pandemic and provided free of charge to doctors while they needed it most.

The build quality shows in the operating history: the platform has run continuously since 2020, added multi-channel calls in 2026, and has required essentially maintenance-only engineering since 2025.

How it works

The doctor sends the patient a video-call link by SMS — a "magic link" that opens in any browser. No apps to install, no patient accounts to create.

Privacy is built into the product's design: only the doctor's name is shared with the patient — their email and phone number are never exposed. The call runs as a direct browser-to-browser connection, live until either party ends it, and a patient waiting room with two-way chat keeps patients informed while the doctor prepares.

What we did

Rather than building on a third-party video vendor with per-minute fees, Stacktrace implemented an in-house WebRTC stack — giving the platform full control of the video pipeline and its biggest ongoing cost saving. Hosting runs on AWS, with SMS delivery via ClickSend and AWS.