Adherium taps Lemon.io to power its US expansion with a new patient monitoring app

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 that helps patients and providers manage respiratory disease more effectively and gives providers and payers real-time insight into how well treatments are working.

With new reimbursement pathways for remote patient monitoring opening up in the US, Adherium shifted its focus to North America. That meant getting the platform ready for a large, highly regulated market fast. Without the time or resources to do it in-house, they partnered with Lemon.io.

Moving into the US meant Adherium’s platform had to meet a higher compliance and security bar than it had before. The Lemon.io team moved fast on the audit and security work needed to make the app market-ready.

When Lemon.io needed access to specific systems, it went straight to the right people instead of adding more work to David’s plate. Within days, the team was suggesting observability and traceability improvements.

“I sent Eugene an onboarding list of things to do,” David shares. “By day two, he did all that and sent me back a list of all the things we can improve quickly at no additional cost.”

Beyond compliance, Adherium wanted the app itself to work better for the people using it. Lemon.io helped restructure the platform, shifting it from a device-centric model to a more patient-centered one, expanding its use cases and resolving pain points that had frustrated patients and care managers for years.

With the platform’s foundation taking shape, the Lemon.io team turned their attention to the backlog, shipping new features right away, while building out ways to automate the testing process.

The Lemon.io team didn’t just work from a brief. They joined daily standups, contributed to docs, and communicated asynchronously with colleagues around the world. During one server update, Lemon.io engineers across Ukraine and Brazil worked nearly 20 hours alongside Adherium’s internal team in Melbourne, handing the work off to each other until it was resolved.

Even with a lot to do and deadline pressure, David still wanted to make sure he brought on the right talent. Testing the waters with an agency on a smaller project felt like a way to confirm devs were a good fit before scaling up.

“A client wanted some features specific to them, and I didn’t have an in-house resource, so I started reaching out to dev shops to see what they could do,” David explains.

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

“I find Brooks’s Law to be very true: the more people you have in a project, the greater the chance for communication breakdowns and errors. The other agencies just weren’t factoring in that communication tax.”

Lemon.io’s structure stood out. Day to day, he’d work directly with an engineer, rather than routing requests through a director, then a manager, and then finally the person actually doing the work.

That lean structure lowered Adherium’s total costs and cut out the potential for miscommunication. “Plus, it ended up being 50% cheaper,” he says.

And it minimized his risk. “I liked that I could use the resource part-time. That way, I could kind of right-size the commitment and land the plane with other things we were building,” David emphasizes.

David started with one Lemon.io engineer, then quickly added three more.

For David, the difference between Lemon.io and a traditional dev shop comes down to the model and the relationships it makes possible.

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

Building a product that needs to get launched quickly? See how Lemon.io can help you ship it right.