Adherium taps Lemon’s global talent to scale fast in the US market

Adherium is a respiratory remote patient monitoring platform from Australia. Its signature product, Hailie® SmartInhaler, helps people with asthma and COPD breathe better – but it’s more than just an inhaler. The connected device pairs with an app for both patients and providers. It wants to:

1. Help patients and providers manage respiratory disease more effectively.
2. Give providers and payers real time insight into how well treatments are working.

With the effectiveness of this model, it’s not surprising that Adherium has been in the respiratory health business for nearly twenty years.

But with new reimbursement pathways and an eye towards value-based care, the company decided to shift its focus to the North American market. To keep pace, David Haddad, Adherium’s Head of Product and Technology, needed to build an expert engineering team and infrastructure – fast.

When David contacted Lemon, Adherium needed coverage on multiple fronts: backend migrations, frontend work, DevOps, and QA. But he wanted to test the waters with an agency first in order to build value quickly for the company.

He was disappointed. Besides coming in with higher quotes, they had multiple layers of management that would slow things down.

Lemon, he’d soon find out, was different.

Flexible by design

David had first come across Lemon in the My First Million Group and the Hampton network. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he decided to learn more about their model.

Lemon’s account team would be available if he needed billing support or assistance with future hires, but day-to-day, he’d work directly with an engineer – not funneling requests through a director, who would then pass them to a manager, who would relay them to the engineer actually doing the work.

That lean structure lowered Adherium’s total costs and cut out the potential for miscommunication.

Quick and easy 

Lemon lined up three strong candidates, and David ended up hiring one of them right away.

He didn’t have to waste his own time sifting through tons of resumes on Upwork, Toptal, or other sourcing platforms.

And he minimized his risk.

David started with one Lemon engineer, but quickly added another – and two more after that.

That go-getter attitude carried into the specifics of their work:

Tackling security and systems head-on

Eugene, a platform engineer, identified areas for platform improvement within days.

When he needed access to specific systems, Eugene went straight to the right people (instead of adding more work for David). Soon, he implemented crucial healthcare compliance upgrades and strengthened observability and traceability across the platform.

Acting as thought partners

Johnny, a senior engineer from Brazil, restructured Adherium’s app, shifting it from a device-centric to a patient-centered approach.

He made the app more consistent, suggested ways to expand its use cases, and solved pain points that had frustrated patients and care managers for years.

Fully embedding themselves

Lemon engineers don’t just work from a brief. They join daily standups, they contribute to docs, and they communicate asynchronously with colleagues all over the world. 

When working on a server update, Eugene (in Ukraine) and Johnny (in Brazil) worked nearly 20 hours alongside internal Adherium resources (in Melbourne), handing the work off to each other until the issue was resolved.

Clearing long-standing roadblocks

According to David, Adherium’s other two Lemon engineers have been just as impactful.

What’s routine for Lemon engineers has been transformative for Adherium.

For David, the difference between Lemon and a traditional dev shop comes down to the model.

The relationship has already gone beyond transactional. David plans to meet one of his Lemon engineers in person while they’re on holiday in the US.

Want engineers who feel like a part of your team? Sign up to sign on your first dev.