Impact
- 152 apps and 107 workflows built, primarily by non-engineer leads
- 40,000+ executions per month
- 40% reduction in administrative operating costs from one case management tool
- 55% faster prescription delivery lead time
- 10% reduction in patient no-shows
Company overview
Industry: Healthcare
Size: 5,000 physicians in-platform
Country: Japan
Fast Doctor operates an on-demand house-call medical service in Japan, dispatching doctors to patients’ homes and offering 24/7 telemedicine consultations. Roughly 5,000 physicians participate on the platform, and the company also supports medical institutions through BPO services. Its Online Business Division continuously launches new medical departments, expanding beyond acute care into chronic care areas like lifestyle-related disease and psychosomatic medicine.
Each new medical department comes with its own patient needs, KPIs, and operational constraints. That meant workflows for appointment booking, check-in, consultation, prescription handling, billing, and follow-up couldn’t be standardized across departments. Traditional development took several months from requirements to implementation, which was too slow for hypothesis testing, and required committing to full-scale builds before validating whether a new department idea would work.
Working with Retool’s Japan partner GxP, Fast Doctor built a framework for rapidly building apps during the proof-of-concept and product-market-fit stages of launching a new department, enabling teams to test operational hypotheses in the field within days.
Fast Doctor needed a universal workflow for new medical departments
Online medical care runs through a series of steps: appointment booking, check-in and registration, consultation, prescription handling, billing, and follow-up. But patient needs vary sharply by department. Patients seeking care for acute symptoms want medication as fast as possible; chronic-care patients place more weight on ongoing access to the same physician and fewer in-person visits.
Because expectations differ, the bottlenecks differ too, which meant Fast Doctor couldn’t apply one workflow model across departments. Each new department needed its own KPIs and its own operational design, tested and refined against real use.
Traditional scratch development wasn’t built for that pace. Requirements-to-implementation timelines ran several months, and because full-scale development had to start early, the cost of validating whether an idea worked was high before Fast Doctor knew if it was worth pursuing.
Designing an app-building workflow for fast iteration and governed scale
Fast Doctor splits the launch of any new business initiative into three stages:
- POC (Proof of Concept)
- PMF (Product-Market Fit)
- Core product development
In the POC stage, teams build tools with only the functionality needed to test a hypothesis in live operations. In the PMF stage, the company determines whether the initiative is working based on KPI performance and actual user adoption. Only then do teams invest in building that initiative into a full, core system.
Fast Doctor established a framework for rapidly building applications during the POC and PMF stages using Retool, making it possible to introduce new tools into live operations within days to a week and make go/no-go calls based on real usage data rather than waiting on a lengthy build cycle.
Fast Doctor needed to understand workflows end to end, form hypotheses from frontline operations, visualize results quickly, and analyze data across functions—then feed what it learned back into operations. That meant treating governance and structure as part of the strategy from the outset, not an afterthought bolted on once things scaled. As usage has expanded across the organization, Fast Doctor and GxP keep refining how Retool apps and workflows were built and reviewed, working to avoid tools becoming dependent on any one person and to keep integration points with core systems manageable.
New tools already cutting costs and lead times to improve patient experiences
A case management tool for new medical departments was built by a single business lead in about three weeks, supporting cross-functional coordination like inquiry handling and patient support tracking. It cut administrative operating costs by 40%.
A prescription delivery tool, developed in about a month by a two-person team led by a product manager, streamlined the post-consultation workflow and cut prescription delivery lead time by 55%.
A next-appointment reminder feature, built in roughly two hours, supported continuity of care for chronic patients and reduced no-shows by 10%.
Secure, governed speed for custom-built apps and workflows
Fast Doctor now runs 152 apps and 107 workflows, generating more than 40,000 executions a month, built primarily under non-engineer leadership—freeing engineers to focus on core system architecture instead of every operational tool request.
Development timelines that once took several months now run a few days to a week. Hypotheses used to be costly to explore, but can now be tested the same day. Investment decisions are made in real time against live KPIs, instead of waiting for a full release. The organization has been able to maintain the speed of validating new initiatives without slowing down, while also preserving the core quality of its systems.
What’s next
As adoption has spread, Fast Doctor ran into challenges with code becoming overly dependent on the specific individuals who built it. Those experiences made clear that defining the appropriate scope of use, and establishing an engineer review process, are necessary once a platform moves from early experimentation to daily-operations infrastructure.
Going forward, Fast Doctor and GxP plan to keep refining that balance: continuing to launch and test new medical departments in short cycles while tightening the review and governance processes that let the model scale safely.
Want to see how Retool can help your team move from experimentation to governed enterprise scale? See more examples of Retool healthcare use cases.
