Digitalization in healthcare: how a vision became reality

Tackling digital opportunities in the healthcare sector

Our client, a leading swiss group of clinics specialized in eye disorders and aesthetics found themselves in a complex situation. For years, they committed themselves to ensure people find their way in a visually oriented world and managed to establish themselves successfully by providing high-quality medicine and personal care to their patients. In recent years, however, it became clear to them that digitalization is going to play a significant role in the future of healthcare. But with the vast opportunities existing nowadays, taking the right decision in which direction to move can be challenging. Additionally, as many approaches involve completely novel technologies, the implementation and introduction of those to a company is an arduous process. Hence, the impact of this decision becomes even more significant for the future of a company.

Assess the client's digital readiness and deep dive for details

In a first step, we assessed the current state of the company during eight weeks of intense collaboration with the client's management team. We introduced a digital strategy framework and utilized it to evaluate the company's “digital readiness” across different dimensions. During this first phase, we realized that their core business processes were exhibiting great potential for improvement. In order to ensure that we bring the most value to our client, we went on to conduct an end-to-end analysis and added the results to the overall picture we constructed.

The Digital Strategy: Setting the course

With all the information gathered and combined with our digital expertise we developed a digital strategy for our client which incorporated their ambitions and included concrete "digitalization goals" for the company to reach. In addition, we condensed all identified digital opportunities and solutions to existing pain points to actionable projects and summarized them in a roadmap which would allow our client to reach their goals.

Making visions come true

Once the roadmap was defined, the client was eager to start with the execution. However, at the time, they were in the middle of a structural transformation and were lacking the dedicated resources for its implementation. Due to the successful collaboration in the first phase and thanks to the project management expertise of OpenWeb Technology, the client asked us to support them with the implementation.

This collaboration resulted in the successful finalization of 14 projects within one year, including the tackling of a fundamental software migration project they had been attempting to realize for a long time.

Ensuring the digital transformation

After successfully finalizing a few projects, our client realized that one of the basic challenges that presents itself in digitalization is the adaption of the company to new processes and solutions. Considering our client's decentralized organizational structure in terms of both, management and location, the adaption imposed an even greater challenge in this case.

To solve this issue, we set up an online learning academy with over 40 courses on not only the new but also existing processes and solutions. Thereby, we were able to ensure a standardized knowledge foundation for our client and, at the same time, we provided a tool to facilitate the adaption of the company to new processes and solutions.

Iterative Journey

• Understand the current internal & external situation
• Deep dive into core business processes to ensure a detailed view of the company
• Develop the vision for their digitalization together with the client
• Define the required work packages to reach the ambition
• Create a roadmap with the work packages
• Execute the roadmap and deliver the defined projects
• Set up online learning academy to support the digital transformation