Medical Platform Doximity Delivers Anytime, Anywhere Video at Scale

ABOUT

The Largest Medical Professional Network in the U.S.

As part of its mission to help physicians provide better care for their patients, Doximity publishes huge volumes of visual content to keep its members updated on the latest medical news and information in their fields. The Cloudinary Image and Video Platform and digital asset management (DAM) solution help Doximity keep massive volumes of visual content running, anytime and anywhere, at speeds even the most time-pressed physicians can rely on. After outgrowing its current video platform, Doximity selected Cloudinary to handle its extensive image and video transformation, resizing, search, and delivery requirements, while ensuring seamless integration with its tech stack.

Founded in 2010, Doximity is the leading digital platform for U.S. medical professionals. The company’s network members include more than 80% of U.S. physicians across all specialties and practice areas. Doximity provides its verified clinical membership with digital tools built for medicine, enabling them to collaborate with colleagues, stay up to date with the latest medical news and research, manage their careers and on-call schedules, streamline documentation and administrative paperwork, and conduct virtual patient visits. Doximity’s mission is to help doctors be more productive so they can provide better care for their patients.

THE CHALLENGE

127 Million Videos — and Counting

Doximity employs a robust team of editors, illustrators, quality assurance testers, product managers, and engineers who produce and publish videos, articles, and images for its newsfeed. By 2023, Doximity had accumulated more than 127 million video assets that needed to be managed, adding up to an incredible 23TB. The company’s rapidly growing membership community led to more images and videos to upload, curate, transform, and optimize for various mobile devices.

“We needed the ability to manage the ever-increasing volume of images and videos, dynamic transformations, and streaming video,” says Doximity’s Director of Engineering James Hicks. “We also needed to free our teams up from having to become experts in image storage — so they could focus on building products for the doctors we serve.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Automated Transformation With Fully Integrated API-Based Solutions

At the center of Doximity’s move to Cloudinary was its need to manage and resize a massive volume of video assets to adapt to various design needs, specifically on mobile. Additionally, Doximity needed to optimize its members’ profile images at scale, including resizing full-size originals on member pages to smaller versions across different platform sections, such as news feed comments and colleague requests.

With Cloudinary, Doximity was able to automate all image and video transformations with fully integrated API-based solutions.

“If we had to try to resize all of our digital assets manually, as the UI changed and we were lining up new products, we would have needed a whole team of people dedicated to just that,” says Hicks. “Being able to tap into Cloudinary’s image and video transformations has really enabled us to move quickly.”

THE RESULTS

Reliable and Relevant Video Anytime, Anywhere

In an industry where every second matters, Doximity’s visual media life cycle is now aligned with the pace and mobility requirements of its huge medical community. With Cloudinary handling critical parts of Doximity’s visual media stack, sharing images and video is fast and effortless. Doximity’s editorial team can publish valuable news without delays caused by manually transforming visual content.

With Cloudinary, Doximity was able to scale more efficiently and meet the increasing needs of its growing medical professional membership.

“Being able to leverage dynamic, on-the-fly transformations via Cloudinary enabled us to focus on content, and not the presentation of the content,” says Hicks.

Hicks and his team continue to find more visual workflow challenges for Cloudinary to solve. For instance, Doximity members can now stream videos regardless of available cell coverage, which is crucial for this community. As Hicks explains, “Adaptive bitrate streaming is one area where Cloudinary really shines for us.” By adjusting a video stream’s quality for available bandwidth and device capability, members can watch videos during breaks or downtime regardless of cell coverage, which varies significantly in different parts of large medical facilities.

Hicks and his team are so confident in Cloudinary that they continually look for new ways to gain value from it. “Right now, one of our teams is building new curation tools for editors,” he says. “We’re working to deepen our integration with Cloudinary to smooth the transition between our internal tools and the DAM. This helps editors manage content more efficiently and select the best content to show members.”

“It’s genuinely been years since we’ve had to think about how we optimize assets to deliver them to our users,” says Hicks. “The key value that we’ve gained over these past years as we’ve scaled up our platform has been the opportunity to enrich our members’ experience on Doximity with reliable and informative video content.”