Situation
Our client, a leading group of Swiss private clinics, identified that their
paper-based patient invoicing process was time consuming and error-prone.
Nurses and doctors had to spend valuable time gathering and writing
information used for billing every patient. At the end of the journey,
accountants had to manually control & type billing information in the
clinic's ERP, leading to delays up to 3 months in the emission of bills.
We have been approached by the CEO to digitalize and optimize this process
end-to-end. The objectives were threefold:
• Prevent operational errors
• Reduce length of invoice management cycle
• Re-allocate nurses & accountants' effort to more added-value
activities
Approach
Our team of consultants accompanied the client in its digital transformation journey, leveraging a combination of best-in-class ideation, development and change management techniques.
Step 1: Understand & represent the “as-is” and “to-be”
situations
We dressed like nurses and shadowed them throughout their journey. We
understood challenges they faced, and did the same for accountants. This
observation helped us draw the existing process, (“as-is”) including every
steps, documents and actors involved. We added best practices from
competitors and created recommendations based on their performance.
Then, we jointly designed a new process (“to-be”) answering main pain-points
and responding to the client's initial objectives. The CEO validated this
new way of billing the clinic's patients.
Step 2: Specify & develop the solution
We recommended the creation of a mobile billing application, carried by
nurses via iPads. Our team designed the application's screens, defined the
application's functionalities, and proposed a technology to support it, in
accordance with client's needs.
Following the best agile development practices, the solution was totally
developed in 3 months. Every two weeks the client had a demonstration of the
work in progress and could bring few adjustments here and there.
The final product was delivered turnkey, deployed in the clinics network,
with content, ready to use. Training the nurses was very quick and easy as
nurses had been involved since the beginning. And so was the acceptance of
the solution.
Step 3: Accompany, support and improve
We accompanied the client through the whole change management process.
Starting with a sample of user, we grew the deployment of the digital
solution to the whole clinic. Our presence also enabled the development of
new features as requests came along and the client always had on premise
support.
Less than a year after the project started, we have seen significant improvements in the billing process:
• It is now paperless
• Resources have been freed-up
• Bills are issued faster
If you are facing similar challenges in your industry, contact us. Open Web Technology will make your digital transformation happen.
