About Pelago Health
Pelago Health is a virtual-first clinic delivering specialty substance use care across the United States, supporting members with tobacco, alcohol, opioid, cannabis, and stimulant use.
Founded on the premise that substance use is a treatable chronic condition, Pelago combines evidence-based digital tools with a physician-led care team — physicians, nurses, coaches, and counselors — to give members a private, stigma-free path to change their habits. The company is led by addiction scientists and backs its model with 15 peer-reviewed publications on engagement, clinical improvement, and medical savings.
The Challenge: Building a compliant, always-on AI platform
Pelago wanted to build an always-on AI care platform, but doing so in the United States’ highly regulated healthcare environment meant every design decision had to clear multiple compliance lenses before it could ship.
The startup was determined to:
- Meet every compliance requirement: The platform had to attest to a wide range of healthcare regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Each compliance lens needed to be fully covered before launch.
- Marry AI services with in-house engineering: Pelago needed a partner who could bridge AWS’s compliant AI platform capabilities with its own engineering team’s roadmap.
- Clear a growing technical backlog: The engineering team had accumulated a backlog of technical items that was on track to stretch beyond two months, slowing product delivery.
- Deliver hyper-personalization at scale: Moving away from a one-size-fits-all healthcare model toward a tailored, 24/7 service required generative-AI capabilities the team needed to integrate quickly.
“The challenge we faced was to try and build an always-on AI behavioral health platform. We really had to ensure that all of the regulations that we had to attest to and all the compliance lenses were going to be covered.”
— Josh Hill, Senior Director of Engineering, Pelago Health
The Solution: An embedded engineer and best-in-class AWS AI services
Pelago turned to AWS and Automat-it, an AWS Premier Partner, to combine AWS’s compliant AI platform with hands-on engineering delivered directly inside Pelago’s team.
The project roadmap included the following:
- AWS HIPAA-eligible foundation: AWS provided the compliant platform Pelago needed, with HIPAA-eligible services underpinning the sensitive healthcare workloads.
- An embedded Automat-it engineer: Automat-it placed an engineer with specific AWS and AI expertise directly inside Pelago’s team, bringing in-house AWS expertise to marry AWS’s platform capabilities with Pelago’s engineering roadmap.
- Generative AI with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Nova: To deliver the product in a generative-AI vein, Automat-it’s embedded engineer integrated Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Nova, alongside off-the-shelf services such as Amazon EventBridge.
- Automated delivery pipeline: The embedded engineer built an automated delivery pipeline, accelerating how the wider product shipped.
“AWS has the platforms. Automat-it had the in-house services that we could lean into in order to marry those two worlds together alongside our engineering team.”
The Results: A backlog cleared and a product delivered faster
From the day the embedded engineer joined, Pelago saw momentum snowball quickly. Crucially, the backlog that was holding the startup back began breaking down and the wider product started to benefit at a crucial time of expansion and in the build process.
Results included:
- A two-month backlog broken down: A backlog of technical items that had grown to over two months of work began getting broken down and worked through from day one.
- Faster product delivery: With an automated delivery pipeline in place, the wider product shipped faster than the team could have managed alone.
- A hyper-personalized, always-on service: Generative AI enabled Pelago to move beyond a one-size-fits-all model to a tailored, 24/7 service for the people who need it most.
- A compliant AI platform: The platform was built to cover the healthcare compliance requirements Pelago had to attest to.
Customer Testimonial
“The partnership between Automat-it and AWS is really central to how Pelago is able to grow and scale their operations in the industry that we are in, and be able to leverage best-in-class generative AI-based services and solutions,” explained Josh.
“Automat-it offers that human interaction lens to an off-the-shelf service from AWS. With that partnership we are able to marry that with our internal teams and bring products to life quicker than we could without it.”
Start Your Journey with Automat-it
Ready to bring your generative-AI product to life faster, with compliance built in from day one?
Get in touch with Automat-it to find out how our embedded engineering and AWS expertise can accelerate your roadmap.