Digital healthcare by Medicover Group

Medicover Group is a private healthcare company serving 4 million customers in Eastern and Central Europe. Established in 1993, this modern healthcare provider expanded to 10 countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Estonia, Germany, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey, Bulgaria and Georgia) and 30+ health disciplines (e.g., cardiology, neurology, oncology, dentistry).

Creating value through fully digital patient management

Each patient is required to have an online profile which is created for them upon joining and accessible from any PC or mobile device. Among other things, through their profile a patient can:

• Sign up for a visit: patients can choose cities, specialties, days and time slots from drop down menus and sign up for a visit with no more than 5 clicks. Cancellation and rescheduling are available online as well
• Request prescription renewal: all previous prescriptions are available on each patient’s profile and can be renewed online
• Check medical history and results: results of blood tests accompanied by physician’s commentary (as well as other tests, e.g., urine) appear online for patient’s review. This allows the patients to see the results as soon as they are available and access their medical history anywhere, any time (useful in case of travel or visit with a different healthcare provider)
• Post questions to physicians: patient can contact each individual physician in case of post-visit follow-up or test results questions. Physician live chat option is also available to patients

Value creation for patients is clear: fast and seamless access to healthcare, medical history from all fields concentrated in one cloud location, quick access to often nerve-wrecking and sensitive test results.

Capturing value through efficient use of resources

Pathways to a Just Digital Future

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Not only patients benefit from Medicover’s digital strategy, but so does the company itself. Owing to their top-notch online platform, Medicover has been able to:

• Create seamless, near real-time market for visit sign-ups: the platform allows for demand and supply matching, leading to most efficient usage of physician time (e.g., visits still available a few hours prior to assigned slot become cheaper to encourage patients to sign up last minute)
• Efficiently use the non-visit time of physicians: whenever Medicover isn’t able to fill a slot via the auction process, physician’s time still does not go to waste – it is spent on providing commentary to test results, responding to patient questions and evaluating prescription refill requests
• Limit the size of their call center: most of the activities currently carried out by the online platform used to be done by the call center. Even though the Medicover hotline still exists, it has been significantly downsized despite ever-growing volume of patients
• Save on administrative costs: test results used to be printed and delivered to patients and their medical history used to be kept in physical form in data warehouses, while currently annual savings from digitization run high.

Victims of their own digital success

Thanks to digital strategy unheard of in their space and corner of the world, Medicover managed to get themselves into the good kind of trouble: satisfied patients recommending the service to their friends and families, leading to vast oversubscriptions, which the online service could naturally sustain, but the real-world infrastructure behind it could not. However, the final benefit of the digitization comes in handy also to help solve this problem: owing to large amounts of data gathered in the 15+ years of online patient management, Medicover Group knows exactly what kind of real-world infrastructure to invest in in order to meet the growing demand.