Health Data Hosting:
How Malo migrated their Rails app to secure HDS hosting in 48 Hrs

Becoming a parent is a life-changing experience. For new parents, this adventure is extraordinary but also difficult.

Today, 5 to 8% of parents suffer from parental burn-out. Doubts, fatigue, lack of support, search for balance... It is to give back to each parent the power to act on his health and that of his child that the Malo application was created.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Florian Le Goff, co-founder and CEO of Malo, to learn more about this predictive health application that is part of the daily lives of more than 100,000 families, its features and its team. It was also an opportunity to discuss the migration of Malo to Scalingo. Let's go!

How Malo gives each parent the power to act on his or her own health and that of their child

In 2020, Florian Le Goff launched the creation of Malo with Prof. Fabrice Denis, Madhu Desbois and Dr. Agnès Gepner. Their ambition: helping current and future generations gain 10 years of good health.

Three years of research and development have made it possible to develop the first artificial intelligence that makes parents the actors of their family health! By providing parents with personalized health monitoring, enriched with the best medical information, Malo contributes to improving the health and well-being of parents and children of today and tomorrow.

Recommended by health professionals, Malo is the first application that answers all parents' questions with a holistic health monitoring approach. Sleep, nutrition, postpartum... Thanks to its unique support, Malo adapts to their lives to give them the right information, at the right time. They follow their well-being and that of their child in a fun way, while benefiting from programs dedicated to their well-being, advice and personalized content, produced by a community of 35 parenting professionals and 100,000 parents to feed their thoughts, at their own pace, and regain their self-confidence every day.

Upon launch, the Malo app gains over 100,000 parent users in just 12 months!

💡 Good to know: Recognized for its medical seriousness, Malo was the first parenting app to be referenced on MonEspaceSanté, the French Health Insurance's digital health booklet. The digital services on MonEspaceSanté are "services selected by the State for the quality of their content, their transparency, their security, their accessibility and their eco-responsibility."

💡 An actor committed to research, the startup has also been awarded DeepTech certification by the BPI in 2022 to accelerate in the personalized monitoring of family health, in an inclusive and accessible way for all.

How does Malo app work?

Downloadable from MonEspaceSanté, Google Play et l’App Store, the Malo application allows parents to register as soon as they become pregnant and to benefit from a follow-up until their children are 7 years old and for their own well-being.

As soon as they register, users can create a profile and add one or more children. Each month, the parent is invited to answer a pediatric questionnaire to understand the development and the awakening of their child. After the age of 7, the monitoring of the child's health stops but the monitoring for the parents continues. Depending on their answers to the questionnaire, parents can access personalized content to find answers and receive the right medical information at the right time.

Motricity, nutrition, social relationships... a wide variety of areas are evaluated thanks to the answers to the questionnaire and personalized advice, podcasts, videos, articles will be able to inform parents on the next steps in the child's development. More than 6,000 data points per child are evaluated to provide the most accurate answers and advice to parents.

Because children's health also depends on their parents' health, adults' health is also monitored in the app. Malo also helps parents and co-parents evaluate and monitor their sleep, nutrition, work/life balance, return to work and intimate life after the arrival of the child.

35 health professionals in several specialties participate in the construction of the health content available in the app. Concretely, Malo supports parents from pregnancy to the child's 7th birthday with a monthly health follow-up that is fun for parents and their children. Beyond that, however, they can continue the follow-up for the parents.

Malo is used both for primary prevention in health: to avoid the appearance of a disease and for secondary prevention, to detect a disease as early as possible.

Malo, a multidisciplinary team dedicated to parents

Today, Malo has a team of 15 people. Its product team (including developers) works daily on improving the experience for parents and especially on its accessibility so that every parent can easily take advantage of the Malo application. That's why this pole is composed of fullstack developers but also a staff engineer who will guarantee a high level of quality in the technical and infra stack. There is also a senior UX Designer and a UX Writer to ensure the best experience for parents. The product manager is the guarantor between the right medical and scientific balance and the quality of service for parents. As data is at the heart of Malo's product, a Data Scientist analyzes and supervises the proper functioning of the health algorithms that allow Malo to guarantee proper health monitoring. The production cycles are organized as follows: three weeks are dedicated to developing improvements to Malo and one week is focused on maintenance, security and technical debt.

How Scalingo supports Malo in its development

The Malo application is based on the new approaches related to Hotwire, in the Ruby on Rails stack. Digging into the containers and addons used by the Malo team, Florian explains that the developers use web workers and PostgreSQL, Redis and ElasticSearch addons. To automate testing and deployment, the Malo team uses GitHub Actions, which we recently talked about on the Scalingo blog.

More speed and reliability to their users

Scalingo autoscaling is also particularly used to optimize performance and peak loads. By changing the cloud provider, Malo wanted to improve the application performance and gain in speed to promote a better user experience. Scalingo's CPUs are better than their previous host.

Scalingo's responsive and efficient support

Malo's Tech team has been pleased with the interactions and responsiveness of Scalingo support. Unlike other supports that set up different levels of assistance, with Scalingo, the first level of response is directly qualified, which is very appreciable. This saves precious time!

A smooth migration to Scalingo

Malo chose Scalingo, wishing to work with a French player, which is 100% sovereign, efficient and certified as a Health Data Host. Already hosted by a HDS certified cloud provider, Florian had been following Scalingo for several years. Obtaining HDS and 27001 certification in September 2022 convinced the team to consider a migration!

The migration phase went smoothly, thanks to the expertise of Malo's technical team and the help provided by Scalingo's support at every step.

3X more observed speed for Malo users

Scalingo support makes it possible to get answers quickly. Florian underlines that this is not insignificant compared to the competition! For him and his tech team, having people who provide answers at the first level of response is very satisfying and saves time. Scalingo was quick and easy to learn! While waiting for the access management (IAM) and data isolation to come on Scalingo, Florian was pleasantly surprised to learn about the potential availability on demand of other regions outside of France on the 3DS Outscale infrastructure.

The migration phase went smoothly, the support was present and reactive when needed for the Malo team. Seeing the benefits of Scalingo was almost immediate!

The next development steps for Malo

Malo's goal is to help people gain 10 years of healthy life. On the product side, they continue to improve the application to be as close as possible to the parents' needs. Malo is currently working on improving the health programs of parents. For example, the Malo team helps them work on improving their sleep. And everything is done autonomously, Malo gives a helping hand to help parents be actors of their health and well-being.

In a nutshell

Malo is the application that gives parents the power to act on their health and the one of their child. For 3 years, Malo has been helping parents and children on a daily basis to take care of the health of the whole family. As a preventive player, Malo combines human and digital support in a respectful care path.

It is no coincidence that Malo is the first parenting application to be referenced in MonEspaceSanté from the French Health Insurance. The Malo team has chosen the Sovereign Cloud by choosing Scalingo, the 1st Platform as a Service certified Health Data Hoster and ISO 27001.

The strengths of Scalingo for Malo are:

• Sovereignty and security of data hosted in France
• More performance and speed for users
• A reactive and efficient French-speaking support
• An easy-to-use interface for the Tech team

A successful Malo x Scalingo collaboration that allows more than 100,000 families to track the health of their entire family!

Are you interested in Scalingo? Meet our team! Schedule a demo and get a free 30-day trial!