How DataDome Helps Clínica Alemana’s Doctors See More Patients

The Problem: Bots Were Filling Doctors’ Agendas With Fake Appointments

On Clínica Alemana’s website, an online agenda lets people schedule their own medical appointments—a great convenience for patients and doctors alike. However, at one point, the clinic’s staff started to notice increasingly frequent no-show appointments.

“These ‘ghost’ appointments turned out to have been booked by bots,” says the cybersecurity submanager at Clínica Alemana. “Sometimes, bots were filling the doctors’ entire agendas with fake appointments. Our medical staff would be waiting for patients who never showed up, the office staff would try to call back only to discover that the phone numbers were fake, and by then it would be too late to free up those time slots for real patients.”

So naturally the team were considering how to prevent fake account creation to solve this issue. The Cybersecurity Team decided that they needed external help to stop the pointless waste of doctors’ time, and to deal with all the other bot-related issues they were having: content scraping, fake account creation, form spamming, and more.

As a lean team, they wanted an anti-bot solution that would require minimum intervention on their part.

“We’re a clinic, not a bank with hundreds of cybersecurity experts on staff,” he says. “We don’t have hours every day to administer a security tool; we needed something that would handle our bot traffic automatically.

The Solution: Hands-Off Bot Protection Across All Platforms

The team’s choice fell on the DataDome solution, which protects websites, mobile apps, and APIs from malicious bot attacks and online fraud. DataDome analyzes every request to the online services it protects, and uses advanced machine learning technology to identify and block bad bots in real time.

“The automated bot protection and ease of maintenance made DataDome the perfect solution for us,” says the cybersecurity submanager, whose team also appreciates the simplicity and effectiveness of switching DataDome on and off at the click of a button.

“At one point last year, we had turned DataDome off because we were analyzing an unrelated problem,” the cybersecurity submanager explains. “Then, we had a denial of service attack. That attack was clearly meant to disrupt our systems. It was consuming all our resources, and our internal systems also suffered from the excess CPU usage. But as soon as we switched DataDome back on, the resources were freed up, and we went back to being operational again.”

The Results: Better Use of Doctors’ Time, Improved Performance, and Lower Costs

Today, DataDome protects Clínica Alemana’s online services from bot-driven fraud, so that only humans can book appointments and doctors are no longer wasting their time waiting for non-existing patients. The solution also handles all other bot-related threats, with no need for daily intervention from the IT security team.

“DataDome prevents all sorts of issues: ransomware attempts, intel theft, SQL injection, and so many DDoS attacks,” the cybersecurity submanager points out. “Looking at the dashboard, we’ve been amazed by some of the attacks directed at us. The graphs are quite impressive!” 

Speaking of the dashboard, he applauds its clarity and ease of use. The completeness of the available data makes the dashboard useful, not only for the cybersecurity team. The development and operations teams are also using DataDome to analyze and better understand Clínica Alemana’s traffic, which is now more stable and no longer slows down the clinic’s online services.

“We don’t have to worry about bot traffic anymore,” the cybersecurity submanager sums up. “Our doctors are using their time more efficiently, our website is performing better, and we have lower infrastructure costs. All this without me having to look at DataDome at all—we’re just letting it run.”