Scaling Telehealth for 5 Million Students: How Hazel Health Migrated from Heroku to AWS with datarabbit

Hazel Health is one of the most recognized names in school-based telehealth. The company has redefined access to healthcare for K-12 students, building a model that integrates both medical and mental health services directly into school systems. With over $170 million raised across multiple funding rounds, Hazel’s growth trajectory has been remarkable. By mid-2025, its services were available in 18 US states, covering more than 5 million students roughly 10% of the K–12 population in those regions. For districts, Hazel Health represents not just a partner in care, but a bridge to equitable access: students can receive timely physical and mental health support regardless of income, location, insurance, or immigration status.

But with rapid growth came a critical infrastructure challenge. Hazel’s platform, originally hosted on Heroku, was increasingly straining under both scalability requirements and cost pressures. Renewal of the Heroku enterprise contract was approaching quickly, and leadership knew they had to act quickly, as staying on it meant facing mounting costs in the $250k to $500k range while providing less flexibility and less services. More importantly, the platform risked slowing down development velocity at a moment when Hazel was expanding aggressively into new states. Missing the migration window meant not only a costly contract extension but also delays in rolling out new capabilities for schools and students depending on them.

The stakes were high. Hazel needed to be ready for migration from Heroku to AWS in just a few months. Their internal DevOps and platform team set the direction, but they needed more manpower and specialized expertise to execute quickly and flawlessly. A trusted referral pointed them to datarabbit.

Hazel chose datarabbit because of a proven track record in healthcare projects, including infrastructure ones where compliance, scalability, and speed of execution were non-negotiable. The engagement was clear: help rebuild Hazel’s cloud foundation on AWS to enable faster development, lower costs, and greater control, all while meeting strict healthcare data security requirements and enforcing best practices.

datarabbit delivered a new AWS infrastructure from the ground up. At the core was a Kubernetes-based architecture on Amazon EKS, ensuring provider independence and future-proof scalability. Every component of the environment was codified in Terraform (OpenTofu) and Terragrunt, enabling fully automated and repeatable deployments. Continuous integration and delivery pipelines were re-engineered with GitHub Actions and FluxCD, and secrets-management improved and centralized. Developers could now containerize their monolithic Java applications and deploy to new environments with confidence, all without manual intervention.

The results were immediate and measurable. By completing the migration before the Heroku renewal deadline, Hazel avoided the costs of another annual contract – representing a 50-75% saving (before final optimization of instance types, reserved instances, etc.) across projected run rates. Beyond cost savings, developer efficiency increased significantly. Deployments that previously required some manual oversight became automated, cutting hours of repetitive work and reducing error rates. Hazel’s platform team could now focus on building features that improved patient care instead of fighting infrastructure limitations.

For Hazel Health, the migration was not just a technical upgrade but a strategic enabler. With a modernised AWS-based platform, they can scale their applications confidently as they expand into more districts and states, ensuring millions more students gain access to equitable healthcare. For datarabbit, the project is another proof point in a track record of over 20 successful healthcare technology engagements, always executed with compliance-first precision across HIPAA/GDPR, ISO, and FDA frameworks.

If your organization is facing similar scaling, compliance, or infrastructure challenges, datarabbit can help you accelerate transformation while reducing risk. Let’s talk about how we can build the right foundation for your growth.