When Myles Lawlor took the job as chief technology officer at Alternaleaf, Australia's largest online alternative health clinic, he started calling industry contacts to talk about the startup's tech needs – and they would hang up on him.
He tried to use Shopify for e-commerce and Stripe for payments. Neither would let Alternaleaf use their platforms.
Lawlor thinks the reason for vendors' rudeness or reticence was that Alternaleaf provides medicinal cannabis to its clients.
Not that you'd know it from the clinic's website, which is replete with references to "alternative medicine."
"The nature of the products and medication – cannabis – still has a lot of negative perceptions as a prescription drug and also at a tech level," Lawlor told The Register.
Any stigma surrounding medical cannabis in Australia is by design: the government regulates the substance closely, and it can only be prescribed by a doctor.
Most medicos aren't keen.
Alternaleaf's play is therefore to employ the nurses and doctors it needs to screen and consult with prospective patients, offer their services online, fulfil prescriptions, and maintain an ongoing relationship with clients.
Building a platform to do that would not be easy even with vendor support.
Building it without their support has seen Alternaleaf hire over 200 IT staff – all of them working remotely from within Australia – since Lawlor joined in 2022.
That's a big IT department for any business, never mind an 800-strong startup like Alternaleaf.
Lawlor says the big team is needed because even if vendors would work with the company, few off-the-shelf products offer the functions it needs to deliver the alternative experience of rapid online access to medicos.
Building, rather than buying, therefore made sense.
One result of that decision saw Alternaleaf become a major contributor to cal.com – the open source spinout of calendaring service Calendly.
"We used Calendly, but it doesn't scale to 150,0000 patients," Lawlor recalled.
Alternaleaf's cut of cal.com helps it to schedule its pool of 150-plus doctors and over 200 nurses, so that when clients come to the website and go through its screening processes they can quickly be offered a consultation.
Those processes require a nurse to speak with a patient before a doctor becomes involved. Many of those medicos work part time, but demand is unpredictable. The custom scheduler works around those challenges, and even helps to create reserve pools of medical staff.
Australia's medicinal cannabis industry is in its infancy. Understanding what's available now, and what's in the pipeline, is therefore another consideration for Alternaleaf – as patients won't be happy if prescribed a product that's not available.
A team of 15 to 20 Alternaleaf techies therefore continue work on scheduling tools.
Logistics is another challenge Alternaleaf brought in-house.
"It's not like delivering a pair of jeans, it's not just fulfilment," Lawlor explained. "The medicine can't go from warehouse to patient, it must go to a pharmacy first."
Again, available tools weren't up to the job so Alternaleaf built its own tech.
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Lawlor told The Register that in recent weeks, Shopify and Stripe have come to understand that Alternaleaf is legitimate, and decided they will serve the biz. He hopes their reversal will mean other vendors also change their mind about serving Alternaleaf and the rest of the medical cannabis industry.
He also hopes that Alternaleaf's experiences, and the tools it built, will mean others in the medical cannabis community – or other would-be healthcare disrupters – have an easier time of it.
And he also hopes to set an example for big in-house IT teams, telling The Register he would double his current headcount today if it were possible to find the talent. ®