How Heloa's Health AI Aligns with the Digital Health Doctrine Through Sovereign Cloud

What Scalingo delivered ⤵️

• HDS-certified hosting in France: A hosting solution fully aligned with the requirements of the French “Digital Health Doctrine” (Doctrine du Numérique en Santé).
• Robust data interoperability: All the flexibility of a PaaS, while retaining the ability to securely extract selected datasets to external environments for offline analysis & training of an “explainable” AI system.
• Managed services: Fully managed hosting and database offerings that eliminate the need for an in-house DevOps team.

The results for Heloa 📈

• App listed on “Mon Espace Santé”: By choosing Scalingo’s sovereign, compliant hosting infrastructure, Heloa successfully secured its listing on the French national health platform (“Mon Espace Santé”).
• 80K€ saved annually: Hosting with Scalingo significantly reduced costs tied to DevOps and HDS compliance.
• Total focus on innovation: Freed from infrastructure management, the Heloa team can dedicate 100% of its energy to product development and user impact.

Background and Initial Challenge

Recognizing a gap in postnatal medical support for young parents, Heloa (formerly Malo) set out to address this critical need with an innovative approach : a mobile app for preventive health tracking, designed for both children and parents. From the earliest months, the app can detect weak signals, such as symptoms of postnatal depression or developmental concerns, based on user input. When needed, it promps families to consult their primary care physician.

With a lean team of just three developers, and 220,000 active users, Heloa needed a platform that could combine simplicity, security, conformity and scalability, without unnecessary complexity. Scalingo’s HDS-certified sovereign PaaS proved to be the perfect match.

The French Digital Health Doctrine as a catalyst for change

From the outset, Heloa aimed to be listed on the national health platform, “Mon Espace Santé”, with the ambition of becoming the go-to app for parental health monitoring. To do so, the company needed to align with the requirements of France’s Digital Health Doctrine, particularly in its choice of hosting provider: certified infrastructure (ISO 27001, HDS), GDPR compliance, and legal protection for personal data, all of which are harder to guarantee with a U.S.-based host.

Originally hosted on AWS, Heloa chose to migrate to Scalingo, as soon as it obtained HDS certification. The migration was smooth, completed in just 48 hours, with zero user disruption. Today, Heloa can confidently state that its user data is hosted in France, while still enjoying the ease of use that comes with a fully managed PaaS.

Scalingo: A Flexible, Multicloud-Ready Solution for AI

From a technical perspective, Heloa has opted for a Ruby on Rails monolith, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis databases, all hosted on Scalingo. On a separate instance, the company runs its core business software, Qstudio, which allows medical professionals to update the algorithms powering the app’s health guidance features.

Given its strong need for advanced data analysis, particularly to improve and refine these algorithms, Heloa has extended its architecture with external tools. The company uses Superset, which enable deep analysis of non-identifiable data. These insights help inform doctors' decisions when adjusting algorithmic models.

Thanks to Scalingo’s openness and interoperability, Heloa ensures that all personally identifiable data remains safely stored on managed databases within Scalingo’s HDS-certified environment. At the same time, the platform allows controlled extraction of truncated, anonymized data for secure processing in external environments.

Results and Outlook

For Heloa, using a PaaS like Scalingo has led to significant cost savings, especially on the DevOps side. “Scalingo has allowed us to eliminate the need for a senior DevOps engineer… And if we had chosen to host everything ourselves while remaining HDS-compliant, we’d be facing fixed annual costs of €10,000 to €15,000 just for compliance.”

Choosing a PaaS also allows Heloa to stay focused on what truly matters: the product, rather than the infrastructure. With Scalingo’s fully managed, secure, and compliant hosting, the team can move forward with confidence and clarity."Scalingo allows us to focus 100% on our product, while guaranteeing compliant, secure, and fully sovereign hosting. The migration was fast, the interface is smooth, and we’ve never needed to hire an internal DevOps role. It has freed us both technically and financially."

Conclusion

Heloa is a small team with big ambitions. To move fast without compromising its product-led approach, the company needed solutions that could support its growth without adding friction. With Scalingo’s HDS-certified hosting and managed database offering, Heloa meets the strict requirements of the French Digital Health Doctrine and ensures the highest level of security for user data, all while benefiting from the flexibility of a vendor lock-in-free, multicloud-friendly environment.