When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, companies everywhere realised that to continue servicing their customer base, fast and radical change would be needed. Nowhere more was this true than with Miranza Group, a healthcare specialist based in Spain. For Miranza this was not just a question of financial outcomes, this was about the fundamental wellbeing and health outcomes of patients who needed them, perhaps now more than ever.

Mar Mas, CIO of Miranza Group, immediately recognised the role that digital could play in facilitating appointments and providing a care experience. Mar invited Chakray to join her digital transformation journey to solve this immediate need but also to provide a solid platform for an improved experience well beyond the pandemic.

Miranza Group had a distributed network with independent and heterogeneous infrastructure and technological systems in each clinic. The management of patient appointment requests in the group’s network (16 clinics and more than 3,000 patients), was done manually and independently.

Mar Mas was very clear about what she was looking for with the project towards the digital transformation of the company, she wanted to carry out an initiative with a triple aspect:

• Check In in clinics.
• Waiting management.
• Patient portal that would allow for a unified clinical history.

These changes were intended to improve the user experience, incorporating a new channel for requesting appointments that would complement the traditional telephone channel and would be aimed more at patients with a more digital tendency, accustomed to using online channels. Define a scalability strategy for the incorporation of new clinics to the group, maintaining the distributed network approach and initiate the digital transformation towards the global digitization of the processes that affect the management of their patients. For all of the above, they hired the services of Chakray.

This project not only aims to improve customer service, but also to better manage the IT, marketing, administrative and medical teams of the Miranza Group.

The proposed solution was based on the development and deployment of a centralized global API (deployed in AWS), as well as a local API (deployed in each clinic’s infrastructure) that allows the transformation and standardization of messages between the clinics’ own systems and the global API.

In turn, the global API will be consumed by the online appointment request form on the group’s website, with the required security and data protection policies.

The deployment of the solution is containerized (based on Docker), and includes a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) layer allowing the automation of deployments, using Jenkins and Ansible technologies.

In addition, the proposed solution has a scalability strategy that will be useful in the event that new clinics or centers are incorporated to the Miranza Group, where it would only be necessary to deploy another instance of local integration in its infrastructure and associate it to the global integration.

The solution proposed by Chakray was very well received, from the beginning, by Miranza Group, since it was a perfect fit in technical and budget issues, and was carried out through a Kanban-based milestone planning with weekly monitoring.

In addition, Miranza Group asked Chakray for services such as: Managed Services for the evolutionary and corrective support of the deployed systems, Monitoring and Observability.

The coordination between the Miranza Group and Chakray teams, together with the commitment, involvement and total availability of the IT team, made it possible for the project to be executed successfully, on time and within budget, in addition to avoiding incidents of duplicity of patients in the BB.DD of appointments.

The project was not without its challenges, as the clinics’ systems included legacy databases, which made it necessary to refactor part of the code to make it compatible with them.

The main results obtained were:

• Generation of more solid, homogeneous and agile processes and information systems in the relationship between the IT Department and the rest of the areas of the organization.
• Strengthening of the relationship with the client, starting with technical assistance as a support to the company’s personnel, towards a more mature relationship with a managed service model and with a continuous development of integrations.
• Since the solution went into production 2 months ago, more than 300 online appointments have been generated, 50% of which have been new patients.
• Implementation of Open Source solutions, with high availability that ensures 99% continuity of operations.

The adaptability of traditional patients to the new processes and channels confirmed the success of the digital strategy. Mar Mas acknowledges that:

“The result has been very positive, we did not expect that the patient would adapt so quickly to the new digital channel and that the level of satisfaction would be so high.”

Undoubtedly, the project was successfully executed and was key to the Group’s Digital Transformation. Today, patients perceive Miranza Group as a company focused on digitization and facilitating its users’ experience with its services.

In response to the question “What would you change in the project?”, Mar Mas answered:

 “Nothing. As it was a project to implement a completely new solution, it was approached in an agile way, the result was satisfactory and has not generated any incidents.”

Currently, Miranza Group continues its relationship with Chakray and new projects are being developed, such as: developing and incorporating new integrations that allow improving the business in other areas of the company and including the possibility of creating online appointments for international patients for better control of attendances.