OutSystems Powers Luz Saude's Digital Healthcare Transformation
- 15+ Years as an OutSystems Customer
- >522 Apps Running on OutSystems
- >15 Million Daily Web Service Hits
Luz Saúde—one of Portugal’s largest private health groups—operates 14 private hospitals, and in total 29 facilities, including outpatient clinics and care homes. The organization adopted OutSystems in 2007 to build an intranet and physicians’ portal. It has since used OutSystems, as its application development platform of choice to integrate its diverse IT landscape, creating agile systems of engagement that set the standard for digital user experience for patients and staff alike.
“The COVID crisis has been a proving ground for our digital systems and capacity to innovate. The speed with which we can develop with OutSystems has contributed greatly to our agility in these most testing times.”
– Isabel Ventura, Digital Innovation Deputy Director
Challenge : A Diverse IT Landscape Led to Silos and Poor User Experience
Established in 2000, Hospital da Luz—which means “Hospital Light”—is one of Portugal’s largest health care groups, with 11,500 employees. Innovation is at the heart of Hospital da Luz’s vision, “to be a leading healthcare provider recognized as a reference of excellence and innovation in highly specialized and complex medical care.”
Clinical practice has long been the focus for technology innovation. But, more recently, Hospital da Luz has been investing heavily in digital technologies aimed at making the work of professionals easier while at the same time improving the patient experience and operational efficiency.
Why did Luz Saude choose OutSystems?
- Speed-up Development and Improve Agility
- Deliver Web and Mobile Applications
- Powerful Integration
Solution : Building an API Ecosystem
In 2007, Hospital da Luz started using OutSystems to speed up the delivery of web-based applications. Having successfully delivered a new intranet and physicians’ portal, the healthcare group focused on a more ambitious modernization program.
The goal was to use OutSystems to transform the customer experience for patients and deliver workplace innovation in a more agile and sustainable way. Pedro Damásio, deputy director of application architecture and systems integration, takes up the story.
“Although many of our systems of record could integrate with our ESB platform and HL7 integration bus, several of our information systems lacked modern APIs. We used OutSystems to build out an interface hub that plugged these gaps. Once that was in place, building loosely coupled systems of engagement became a lot easier.”
– Pedro Damasio, Deputy Director of Application Architecture & Systems Integration
Luz Saúde’s software factory includes around 120 developers, tech leads, and architects. Luz Saúde’s use of OutSystems partner development resources results in an elastic development team that can flex from five developers one month to as many as 60 developers at peak times.
By 2022, Luz Saúde had 522 OutSystems applications in production, handling over 15 million daily web service hits. The health group now has a modern agile architecture that supports continuous delivery.
Using OutSystems helps Luz Saúde overcome the modern app dev skills shortage because its developers are now more multi-functional. And by leveraging the OutSystems partner community, Luz Saúde has access to an even broader talent pool.
“With OutSystems, we can more rapidly implement user experience improvements for our staff and customer experience improvements for our patients.”
– David Vieria, Head of IT
Results : Hospital da Luz’s Agility Comes of Age in the COVID Crisis
2019 was a significant milestone for patient experience across the health group. Hospital da Luz launched a new mobile app called “MY LUZ,” with an accompanying updated patient portal.
Developed in partnership with OutSystems—MY LUZ unified many of the digital experiences that Hospital da Luz had developed in preceding years. The app provides patients with one consistent place to interact with healthcare professionals and access their health data. Patients can now access their medical history, billing and payments, and schedule physical and virtual appointments.
Isabel Ventura joined Hospital da Luz as Digital Innovation Deputy Director in September 2019. Continuous enhancement of MY LUZ became one of her many responsibilities.
“I’m currently responsible for twenty-eight digital innovation initiatives,” explains Isabel. “Almost all of these involve MY LUZ, as it aggregates all digital experiences for patients.”
MY LUZ and its digital services are continually evolving. And as Isabel explains, that evolution became more urgent and rapid through the COVID crisis.
“We’re very fortunate to have launched MY LUZ and many other digital services during 2019. If we hadn’t had these foundations, it would have been much more difficult to adapt quickly during the COVID crisis.”
– Isabel Ventura, Digital Innovation Deputy Director
Throughout the pandemic period, Hospital da Luz prioritized and accelerated numerous initiatives crucial to serving socially-distanced patients. Several of those are summarized below :
Luz24 :
Developed in partnership with OutSystems , Luz24 is a phone triage system for patients, operated 24×7 by specially trained nurses. Within three months of launch, Luz24 was handling 4,000 patient calls per month.
MY LUZ :
Developed in partnership with OutSystems, MY LUZ aggregates all digital experiences for patients. The app has grown from 150,000 users to 1 million in just 4 years. The app is constantly evolving, and recent developments added to the application, include:
- Scheduled Video Consultations – enabling patients to book and attend video consultations with doctors. Traditional appointments dropped by 70% during the COVID crisis, so video consultations became an essential service.
- On-Demand Video Consultations – building on the success of the scheduled video consultations, Hospital da Luz decided to launch on-demand access to video consultations, which serve as a useful alternative to accident and emergency visits.
- Symptom Reporting – Patients use the MY LUZ app to quickly submit symptom reports, a necessary COVID screening precaution before visiting a Hospital da Luz hospital, clinic, or care home.
- Wearables Support – Deloitte was the system integrator that researched and implemented the Wearables solution for MY LUZ. Health professionals can now remotely monitor patients’ health by synchronizing data from wearable devices through GoogleFit and Healthkit to MY LUZ. For example, clinicians can monitor calories burned, steps, heart rate, oximetry, blood glucose, blood pressure, sleep, weight, and body temperature. MY LUZ is the first private health patient portal to offer these capabilities in Portugal.
ResultLink :
Developed in partnership with OutSystems, ResultLink allows healthcare professionals to access and validate various reports. Once validated, clinical reports and results are automatically sent to MY LUZ and made available to clinicians. This allows a fully digital, secure, and confidential examination lifecycle.
CCR :
Developed in partnership with OutSystems, CCR provides healthcare professionals with a user-friendly integrated overview of clinical patient data. This is crucial in the case of patients with complex pathologies, where a 360-degree view is needed to combine data from multiple medical specialties, healthcare units, and systems.
Luz Saúde sees OutSystems as an enabler of high-speed innovation, as Ivo Antão, CIO and Board Member of Luz Saúde, explains:
“Recently, we’ve been oversubscribed with health professionals volunteering to join our agile squads. That’s because OutSystems gives us the development speed to turn their ideas into reality in days instead of months. Agile is much easier with OutSystems.”
Case Study Credit : OutSystems
Seize the digital revolution with an established partner.
ACCRO has the experience to help you drive change at scale!
Be more efficient, competitive, sustainable & future-proof with ACCRO.