Building the Technology Stack for a Telehealth Menopause Platform
Industry
Healthcare
Company size
1 - 10 Employees
About
UnPause is an Australian specialist telehealth clinic designed to make expert perimenopause and menopause care accessible to women, regardless of their postcode. Co-founded by comedian Mary Coustas, the service connects patients directly with menopause-expert doctors to provide evidence-based treatments and personalized care plans.
End-to-end
A complete patient journey from website visit to consultation booking to prescription delivery — functional, compliant, and scalable.
The Situation
Unpause was a telehealth startup founded by George and Mary Betsis targeting an underserved segment of Australian healthcare: women navigating perimenopause and menopause. The clinical case was strong. The market gap was real. GP access for women seeking hormonal health support was poor — appointment availability was constrained, specialist referrals were slow, and the patient experience was fragmented.
George and Mary's vision: a platform where patients could book GP consultations for menopause management, get prescriptions, and have them fulfilled and delivered — a closed-loop telehealth service designed specifically for this cohort.
The technology challenge was that this required connecting multiple regulated third-party systems that don't naturally work together:
A lead-generation website (patient acquisition)
A patient qualification form (clinical triage before booking)
GP practice management software (for doctor scheduling and clinical records)
A pharmacy integration (for script fulfilment)
A delivery logistics partner (for medication dispatch)
A payment processor (with healthcare regulatory compliance)
No single platform provided all of this. Unpause needed a technology layer that connected best-of-breed point solutions into a coherent patient journey.
Key Result Metric (KMR): A complete patient journey from website visit to consultation booking to prescription delivery — functional, compliant, and scalable.
Why they called us
George and Mary needed a technology partner who could make vendor selection decisions, not just implement them. The regulated nature of the healthcare stack meant each component required evaluation against compliance requirements: GP software needed to support telehealth and meet Australian medical records standards. The payment processor needed healthcare merchant category approval.
Xanthi joined as effective MD and became the day-to-day decision-maker on the technology stack. She brought a clear view: the product didn't need complex enterprise SaaS. It needed the right lightweight tools connected properly.
The specific constraint Halcrow navigated:
Vendor selection in this space is unusually political. Each GP software vendor has its own partner ecosystem and prefers integrations within it. Payment processors have specific approval requirements for healthcare. Every vendor relationship required active management — not just API documentation.
How we worked
Technology Stack Selected
Component | Tool Selected | Reason |
|---|---|---|
Website | Framer | Speed to build, design quality, easy content management |
Qualification form | Typeform | No-code, conditional logic, integrate via webhook |
GP software | MediRecords (initial) | Telehealth-native, Australian, prescription support |
Pharmacy integration | MediRecords (built-in) | Script send to pharmacy via platform |
Delivery | Sendle | API-first, Australian SMB pricing |
Payments | Novatti | Healthcare merchant approval, Australian regulated |
The MediRecords Decision
MediRecords was selected as the GP practice management layer because it supported the full clinical workflow Unpause needed: patient records, telehealth consultation, prescription, and pharmacy send in one platform.
The integration work with MediRecords consumed significant delivery effort — months of API integration, testing against MediRecords' sandbox environment, and coordination with their support team on edge cases in the prescription workflow.
The vendor change mid-engagement:
Xanthi later moved to replace MediRecords with an alternative, having formed the view that the account manager relationship was too slow. This is an honest account of what happened: the vendor change created a reset of significant integration work. The MediRecords integration was functional before the change was made.
This is what Law 9 looks like in a healthcare startup context. The technical integration wasn't the hard part. The hard part was navigating vendor relationships, approval processes (Novatti's healthcare merchant approval took months), and founder decision-making in a fast-moving startup where clarity of direction changed with stakeholder dynamics.
The Payment Approval Block
Novatti's approval for Unpause to process payments through a healthcare merchant category required regulatory and compliance documentation. This process ran for several months and blocked the end-to-end patient journey from being testable with real transactions until approval came through.
How we worked around this: While payment approval was pending, we built and validated every other component of the patient journey. Website live. Qualification form live. GP software integrated. Delivery workflow validated. The payment integration was the last piece connected once Novatti approval came through.
Law 5: Earlier beats perfect. We didn't wait for all integrations to be complete before validating the components we could validate. Each component that worked added confidence and reduced risk in the remaining components.
WHAT CHANGED
Component | Status at Engagement Close |
|---|---|
Website (Framer) | Live, lead generation active |
Qualification form | Live, integrated with GP workflow |
GP software integration | Functional (MediRecords, pre-change) |
Pharmacy script send | Functional via MediRecords |
Delivery integration (Sendle) | Configured and tested |
Payment processing (Novatti) | Approved and integrated |
The complete patient journey — website to consultation booking to prescription delivery — was functionally assembled by engagement close.
WHY THIS WORKED
Vendor Management as a Technical Skill
Healthcare SaaS builds are not primarily engineering challenges. They're vendor navigation challenges. Every integration requires understanding not just the API documentation but the partner program requirements, the approval processes, and the relationship dynamics of each third-party system.
The teams that succeed in this space treat vendor access as a critical path item — not an assumption. We started the Novatti healthcare approval process on day one because we knew from the architecture review that it would be the longest-lead constraint. While that process ran, everything else was built.
Law 1: Distance is the enemy of speed. The embedded model kept us close enough to each vendor relationship to flag blockers early and adapt when the stack changed.
The Startup Tolerance for Direction Change
Unpause experienced the vendor transition that many healthcare startups do: mid-build clarity about the stack changes as founders get closer to the real product requirements. This is not a failure of planning. It's a characteristic of early-stage product development.
The embedded proximity model is better suited to this than a fixed-spec agency engagement. When the MediRecords decision changed, we pivoted with the team, not against it. We didn't have a "change of scope" conversation — we had a "what do we need to do to move forward" conversation.