Healthcare organizations have to shift from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital

Healthcare institutions that want to improve their business processes with digitalization face an important challenge. How do you deploy digitalization in a way that it actually adds value in solving problems in healthcare? To achieve this goal, a shift from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’ is needed in healthcare. ‘Being digital’ implies that business processes are designed to take place fully online and automated without the need for manual actions. Technologies such as low-code and RPA can play an important role in this transition. It is the main conclusion of the event ‘digitizing healthcare logistics’ organized by Bizzomate and RPA specialist Tacstone Technology, which took place on Thursday, February 16th.

Present at the event at Mendix’s headquarters in Rotterdam were representatives of dozens of Dutch healthcare institutions. Henry Kraaijenbos, partner at Bizzomate, was the first speaker of the day. Next up was Maarten van Rixtel. He is a member of the board of Sensire, the largest care organization in eastern Gelderland.

The current business model in healthcare is unsustainable
In his presentation, Maarten outlined the major challenges facing healthcare in the coming years. Thanks to the aging population, the demand for care will continue to rise while the number of available care professionals remains the same at best. At the same time, financial resources will not keep up with demand. In short, the current business model in healthcare is unsustainable in the long run.

Maarten is convinced that digitalization can make an important contribution to solving this challenge. In his view, healthcare provision can look completely different in a digital world compared to the current situation. Crucially, however, digital developments will only gain value if the entire organization becomes part of it.

From ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’
From ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’ is a crucial starting point. In the current situation, healthcare institutions use a lot of applications, but it still takes employees a lot of manual input work and time to run business processes properly. The added value of these applications is therefore limited. For future business processes, it is important that they’re set up in such a way that they are largely online and automated. This way, organizations can truly practice ‘being digital’ and that is where the real added value for healthcare lies.

Doing more with fewer people
One of the technologies that can contribute is Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the automation of repetitive operations through the use of applications. Mark de Poorter is a partner at Tacstone Technology and specializes in RPA. He explains that RPA solutions can help you do more with fewer people. Among other things, RPA can guarantee continuity; after all, robots are never sick, and also increase work satisfaction because healthcare personnel no longer have to perform boring, administrative tasks.

Take the robot out of human operations
Automating repetitive operations is what they do at Tacstone Technology by “taking the robot out of human operations. This means looking within organizations for processes that are suitable for robots to perform. In healthcare organizations, this could include checking patient records and time records, or updating an EHR with treatment information. An example of this comes from Sander Ter Horst, senior manager at Tacstone Technology. He shows a short demo how GGZ inGeest uses RPA solution ‘Geesje’ to take care of some administrative tasks.

Low-code as a solution for specific problems in healthcare
After a short break it’s time for Charles Bronzwaer, partner at Bizzomate. He elaborates on the role that low-code can play in healthcare.

He starts his presentation by outlining a problem many healthcare organizations struggle with. They want to work more efficiently and support customers better through digital means, but they simply lack the skills and human capacity to achieve this. Moreover, they find it difficult to choose the right technology that can support them in their specific challenges.

If they choose standard software built in a traditional way, they often find that this does not solve all the problems. It takes a lot of time, and changes and modifications are expensive and often do not ultimately meet the institution’s specific needs.

Building healthcare-specific solutions based on low-code is a good alternative. The great advantage of low-code is that there is less programming to do, which increases your development power and results in applications that can be developed up to ten times faster.

However, this does not mean that just anyone can put an app into production. The quality of the developed solution based on low-code is crucial in a market where data privacy and security are of utmost importance.

In a live demo, Jelle Boomsma shows an example of a low-code application built for the ‘Neuromodulatie’ department at GGZ inGeest. In this specific department, there was a lot of emailing and calling to schedule appointments which took up a lot of time. After several sprints, this application went live within two weeks, giving practitioners instant insight into where clients are in their process. The application has been used daily from the start.

Digitalization with low-code and RPA at GGZ inGeest
For a deeper dive of what digitalization with low-code and RPA can look like in practice, Klaas Nieuwhof takes the floor. He is ICT director of GGZ inGeest.

He outlines an organization that was struggling in early 2021. Too few clients were being treated and those that were there were being treated for too long. Also, the support and logistics processes were not contributing enough to efficient and effective care. It was therefore decided to roll out a comprehensive improvement program within the institution.

Improving care logistics was an important pillar in this process. GGZ inGeest looked for a new solution that was modular, flexible and had a user-friendly interface. In addition, the new solution had to be cloud-based. Nieuwhof ultimately chose a combination of RPA and low-code from Bizzomate and Tacstone Technology.

A year later, three solutions have been defined to improve healthcare logistics within the institution. First, process and organizational improvements are being implemented through standardization, digitalization and better registration. In addition, the RPA application “Geesje” is being used to automate repetitive tasks such as creating records or enrolling clients.

Since last September, the development of ‘Clint’, an application that reduces the number of individual actions and further accelerates healthcare logistics processes was started. It focuses on integrating systems and providing workflow support within GGZ InGeest.

Klaas Nieuwhof states that the beauty of deploying low-code and RPA is that it is very suitable for shaping the digitalization process step by step. This allows you, as an organization, to learn during the process and ultimately create applications that fully meet the specific needs and requirements of your institution.

Having a vision is mandatory
Henry Kraaijenbos closed out the afternoon with a brief round of questions. He emphasized once again that healthcare institutions that really want to solve the current problems need a vision and must set qualitative goals. By only looking at costs, you make your institution too dependent on the financial aspects, which will hinder progress.

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