Tel-Aviv Medical Center Case study (Part I - Prologue)
Well, it all started when I made Aliyah, and first time visited Maccabi. You know, instead of making me better, it made me ill - I saw software they were using, and I was in awe. In a bad way. For the past 5 years I've been making software for clinics and hospitals, and knew a thing or two about it, and it was like travelling back in time. 2005 was undoubtably a great year, but it has nothing to do with using software from it in 2023.
I started digging, made some research, and it looked like the problem is not local, it's widespread around medical businesses in Israel and other countries. And it's weird - how can you call yourself innovative (and have Innovation Centers!) if you are using a mess of 30+ software solutions with a pre-historic EHR in the center of it?
I have a belief, that each Aliyah brings something new. So, I decided that I personally should bring here some modern IT solutions for healthcare. I sold my Russian company, invested all the money to built a new solution on the latest stack that could be used in Israel, and will help to bring healthcare IT back to date.
But the worst thing when you try to enter a new market is that you know particularly no one. You may have a great product, but without first pilots you can't even start. Luckily, about half of medical community is Jewish in any country=) So is in Russia, and I managed to find my first connection here through my partners from snowy Siberia, where we implemented our software several years before.
That's how I met Evgene Katsovitch (https://www.facebook.com/evgene.katsovich), owner and CEO in Tel-Aviv Medical Center, a great (and pretty big) private clinic here in Israel. Couple words about him - if you are a fan of Guy Ritchie, like I am, you would definitely agree, that he could replace Boris the Blade, and play a part as Evgene the Hammer=) He made Aliyah like 30 years ago, and spent in medical business more than 15 years.
The center he built and is running (https://tlvmed.co.il) is quite remarkable - over 1 500 square meters, 50 doctors, lots of services in outpatient care and medical examinations and tests. I think it's one of the biggest private outpatient clinics in Israel, and working mostly with private patients. I've seen some clinics in my life (over 200 I guess), and I was really amazed with it.
Great doctors for sure, modern equipment (of course), but they have style! It's a really rare thing here in Israel, believe me=) You can see some of it on the cover image, and it's really great. The whole clinic is a state of art (and has an amazing view from the windows). And they are building patient service and experience as it should be according to best practice.
They have changed several CRMs and other systems through the years, and knew their pains really well. When we met, Evgene told me about the main ones:
- Israeli government and their licensing policy
- Lack of understanding what ads work best and bring them money
- 6 solutions in daily use (Bitrix, cDocs, Google Calendars, Chat2Desk, iCount, Word), people working in multiple windows
- Need to update patient experience, make it faster and smoother
- Pipeline the business processes, reduce errors, make onboarding faster
We couldn't do anything about the first bullet point, sorry, but we definitely could help with the rest. At this time (it was June 2023) we had just a scratch of a system, and lots of plans. But somehow Evgene saw the potential in us, and we agreed to make a pilot with them, tailoring the system for them, and introducing some functions that were completely new to Israeli market (all-in-one concept, online booking, end-2-end marketing analytics, WhatsApp inside the system). I'm very grateful for TAMC that they believed in us at this point. But I know why - because alpacas are awesome!
It took us 8 month to finish development of the system, learning processes, Hebrew (well, that part is still a failure), making right-to-left support (oh, it's a nightmare fuel), but in the end we finally launched, and it looks like we've succeeded. We've achieved all the main goals of the implementation of a new system, and it works great!
How we did it, product concept, f*ck ups, funny stories and results will be in the upcoming parts!
