Agenda system for all non-medical processes - Agel
AGEL is the most successful healthcare provider in Central Europe. In the Czech Republic alone, AGEL operates 14 hospitals, health centres, a network of pharmacies, laboratories, and distribution companies, along with other specialized medical facilities. Since 2006, AGEL has also operated within the Slovak Republic.
Dominik Procházka is responsible for cyber security within AGEL. Previously, he was responsible for AGEL’s IT infrastructure. He explains how the wide variety of hospitals that are operated by AGEL has led to a very diverse application landscape.
Dominik Procházka: "AGEL runs many hospitals. All these hospitals have acquired a number of software products to manage their internal processes. Many of the solutions that were in use, were essentially doing the same thing. It was clear that we could work much more efficiently if we aggregated all processes in one environment. So, we decided to consolidate, streamline and centralize this by implementing one central platform for all non-medical agendas within the AGEL group."
AGEL reached out to various suppliers and evaluated their offerings.
Dominik Procházka: "First, we selected another vendor, but we stopped this collaboration. Their system simply was not ready, not mature enough to deal with our requirements. They had no experience with large environments like ours and could not handle the complexity. Their solution was too basic. We needed complex groups in Active Directory and wanted to implement certain security principles, but they could not deliver this. So we decided to look for alternatives."
Then AGEL came in contact with Netgrif.
Dominik Procházka: "Netgrif made a good impression from the start. Naturally, not everything went flawless from day one. The project is challenging and we were trying out various different angles to find the right solution. But we noticed very early on already that Netgrif were really trying to help. They were taking the input and feedback we provided very seriously. Netgrif possesses the maturity level and skills that match our needs, but are also very flexible in their approach. Large companies often require the customer organization to adjust their internal processes to be able to work with a certain system. That’s not the case with Netgrif. They change the system to fully suit our needs."
Procházka envisions that the project will allow AGEL to accomplish significant cost savings.
Dominik Procházka: "Eventually, we will be able to shut down a number of systems, since we will be working in a much more centralized manner. This will lead to direct cost savings. But we are already seeing the effects of our centralization efforts now. In the past, we worked in multiple systems. As a result, our employees had to learn to work in different environments which led to high on-boarding and training costs. Also, from an IT perspective, we had to support and maintain several applications. By aggregating all these processes in one environment, we have already been able to significantly increase our efficiency."
The aim is to continue to migrate applications to the Netgrif environment, until all non-medical agendas are consolidated.
Dominik Procházka: "It’s great to be able to rely on a trustworthy and flexible partner such as Netgrif for this. They are very flexible and go out of their way to come up with solutions that fully match our requirements. What’s more, they are willing and able to customize the system to our specific needs."