Clic Santé portal handled up to 365,000 appointments per day with zero downtime
When public health officials in Quebec set out to provide COVID-19 vaccination services for their 8 million residents in February 2021, they needed an easy-to-use, scalable solution to schedule appointments online. To make it simple for Quebecers to register for vaccines, the goal was to use Clic Santé, a familiar online portal built on Google Cloud and already in use to schedule flu vaccines and other health-related services. Trimoz Technologies, the portal’s creator, prepared to meet high-volumes of traffic by creating a seamless appointment scheduling experience.
To scale to meet demand, Trimoz relied on Google Cloud, optimizing it for the expected surges. As an enterprise solutions provider to the public sector in Canada, Google Cloud scaled to meet the ongoing surges in traffic to the Clic Santé portal, with the stability and reliability the portal needed. At its peak surge, Clic Santé scheduled 365,000 appointments in a single day, and on average, continues to handle a volume of roughly 50,000 appointments per day. Since launching their appointment scheduling service, Clic Sante has been able to deploy up to a dozen new appointment functionalities each month with no service interruptions, while maintaining up to 2,000 vaccination and 1,500 pharmacies sites to serve the population.
Google Cloud services helped build a more secure, flexible and scalable portal used by millions
“Thanks to our talented and agile team and the flexibility of Google Cloud, we performed hundreds of new releases and added new features and functionalities, without interrupting our services and while maintaining flawless security. We found extraordinary capacity to resolve complex problems with simple solutions”
-Stéphane Lajoie, CEO of Trimoz Technologies
The main components of Clic Santé are hosted using different services to give the team at Trimoz more flexibility with their platform functionality. The portal’s user interface, for example, was built using AppEngine, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, that hosts websites and automatically scales up and down based on the load. AppEngine allows the portal to deploy its web interface without having to manage the infrastructure. Trimoz implemented Cloud SQL, another PaaS solution, to run instances of relational-type databases without needing to manage the infrastructure. Changing the number of instances based on active users gave them more freedom to scale as needed without affecting portal users.
Various healthcare organizations (CIUSSS and CISSS) required appointment-level metrics gathered from Clic Santé to track progression towards their vaccination goal. To handle this, Trimoz uses BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse service from Google Cloud. This service handles data storage economically and allows for future analysis as needed so Trimoz can ensure all data, at rest and in motion, is encrypted to protect the platform and its users.
A reliable, user-friendly vaccination experience for Quebec
Through the partnership between Trimoz and Google Cloud, the vaccine appointment-scheduling portal handles 80,000 connections on average per day, with zero service interruptions. It also provides a user-friendly interface that can handle swells of traffic as needed. This reliability of the Clic Sante portal was one factor among many that helped Quebec reach their goal of vaccinating “75% of the admissible population” in three weeks early.making Quebec’s population one of the most vaccinated populations in the world.
The performance and scalability of the platform will now allow Trimoz Technologies to expand into new markets like pharmacies, other healthcare organizations in other Canadian provinces, U.S. or European markets
Clic Santé in numbers:
- More than 7,000,000 unique users
- 50,000 appointments set in average per day
- Peak of 365,000 daily appointments
- 80,000 connections per day in average
- 100% uptime of the Clic Santé platform
- 4 to 12 new production releases per month
Google Cloud is already widely available for public sector organizations in Canada. We are actively expanding with new regions and solutions with the highest compliance and standards and are committed to providing Canada with the quality service they need from a public sector cloud provider. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud for Canada public sector solutions page.
