Building for the rules before building the features

The Client

The client is an Australian telehealth provider with more than a decade of operating experience across several specialist services. They were opening a new GP-led service in a prescription therapy category that sits under strict advertising rules and close regulator attention.

The commercial model was deliberately conservative. Revenue would come from GP consultations only, with no participation in the medication supply chain. That decision shaped everything that followed, because it meant the platform had to be built to demonstrate the separation, not just claim it.

The challenge

Two problems arrived together.

The first was ordinary: no in-house technical resource, a launch target about six weeks out, and a service that needed a public website, a patient intake pathway, a GP referral portal and a pharmacy fulfilment process before it could see a single patient. An earlier version of the business had already been renamed once, so existing content needed reworking rather than replacing.

The second was the difficult one. Legal advice confirmed that advertising was the single largest compliance exposure in the entire venture, second only to sourcing. The public pages could not name the medicine, could not make outcome claims, and could not reference scheduled medicines. Yet the service depended on GPs understanding the clinical detail well enough to refer patients. The information the audience needed was precisely the information the public site was not permitted to carry.

The approach

The rules were treated as the design brief rather than a review step at the end.

Before anything was built, scope was cut to three priorities in a fixed order: the GP portal first, the pharmacy pipeline second, the patient journey third. One at a time, no parallel builds. The GP portal went first because nothing else could start until at least one GP was on board.

Three working principles held throughout. Legal sign-off was a gate, not a formality, so nothing publicly visible went live ahead of advice. Every build step began with a read-only audit and finished with verification against the live files, so an unexpected result meant reverting and writing a tighter instruction rather than patching over the top. And every account, domain and analytics property was created under the client's own workspace from day one, with contractors given viewer access only.

The solution

The public site was written entirely to the advertising restrictions, including metadata, image filenames and alt text, since all of those are visible to regulators.

The clinical content sits behind a GP portal with a server-side gatekeeper checking approved-practitioner status. That distinction matters: a front-end login that merely hides content does not satisfy the exemption the portal relies on, so the gate was built at the server rather than in the browser. Gated pages are excluded from crawling, and analytics were scoped so they do not fire on protected routes.

Behind the gate sits an evidence library of twenty-two peer-reviewed articles, referral pathways, and the practical detail GPs actually asked for. In total the platform runs to twenty-six pages, nine data entities and six backend functions, with a custom domain, SSL, analytics and search console configured and twenty-five pages indexed. The platform cost is fifty dollars a month.

Next steps

Four steps remain, in order:

1. Integrate the prescribing and fulfilment platform. Connect the GP, patient and pharmacy workflows through a single system so referral, prescription and dispensing move without manual handoffs.
2. Onboard GPs. Restart practitioner recruitment against the verified list, with the portal and evidence library already in place to support it.
3. Live test internally. Run the full end-to-end journey with a small group of staff before any patient touches it.
4. Open to a first patient group. A deliberately small cohort, chosen so they can give structured feedback on the experience before wider release.

This case study will be updated as each step is completed.