Funcional Health creates a cloud-based project to focus on pharma consumers
About Funcional Health
With over 20 years in the market, Funcional Health strives to be recognized as a leader in transforming healthcare data into actions to provide companies with economic sustainability and people with improved healthcare.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About IPNET
IPNET Growth Partner supports its customers' digital transformation journeys in the cloud. It also prioritizes innovative solutions and optimized investments to provide excellent service delivery and add value to relationships.
The company was supported by IPNET and Google Cloud’s solutions to develop a loyalty program for the customers of the Panvel pharmacy chain.
Google Cloud results
- Improved customer loyalty, with a 30% rise in adherence to chronic disease treatments
- Upselling increased by 78%
- Overall cost savings and elimination of idle resources
- Average service response time reduced by 50%
Handles nearly 48,000 requests every day.
Funcional Health is a healthtech whose mission is to generate intelligence to manage healthcare throughout the ecosystem. Fusing technology with more than 20 years of expertise, the company uses the information it accesses and data analytics to increase its customers' efficiency.
Based in Barueri, in the Brazilian State of São Paulo, Funcional Health operates throughout Latin America, employs around 500 staff, and offers a diversified solution portfolio. As an example, two of its programs, "Benefício Farmácia" and "Programa de Benefícios de Medicamentos", provide benefits for ten million people in Brazil, such as discounts in labs and pharmacies for corporate employees.
"For healthcare operators and brokers, we have a service to ensure compliance with existing regulations and actuarial consultancy services. We also have a health analytics business, where we run predictive analytics to manage our customer portfolio," adds Ana Maria Nishikawa, Funcional Health's Head of Marketing.
"We can also mention our support for hospitals and clinics providing specialized treatment for certain diseases and needing to stock special medicine. Lastly, we have our 'Programa de Suporte ao Paciente' [Patient Support Program] for rare diseases, or those requiring more care," concludes Nishikawa.
Funcional Health has always relied on tech as a key factor to work in such an essential field in Brazil as healthcare. This was also the case when it began one of its most important projects: the Bem Panvel Program, which provides discounts for consumers of the Panvel pharmacy network based on how often they purchase products.
A new phase
The partnership with Google Cloud and IPNET was crucial as the company developed and implemented this idea. A solid working relationship made it easier to achieve results.
"Our customer needed to create a scalable, secure solution with cloud-based architecture to deal with Panvel's business challenges in its chronic patient relationship program. We provided the cost feasibility and security the project needed."
—Gabriel Monte, Sales Manager, IPNETAfter those initial efforts and a meeting between the teams, implementation began in the second quarter of 2021, achieving a minimum viable product (MVP) in four months.
"IPNET is a strategic partner in our relationship with Google that has helped us with various aspects of service management. In this particular situation, we wanted to complete the project in four months, but it is constantly evolving and going through updates. This technology was created using only Google Cloud services and resources," explains Bruno Machado, Funcional Health's CTO.
To ensure this cloud-deployed architecture would work, a few tests and models were created to make the solution easier to manage and to assess product usability.
"We currently run services in Google Kubernetes Engine, providing us with the best-case scenario, scalability, and reduced resource usage. Other highlights are Cloud SQL, a fully managed database, and Pub/Sub, a messaging service that decouples senders from receivers."
—Alan Quinot, Tech Leader, Funcional HealthThe results
When comparing cloud technology in Bem Panvel Program's tech infrastructure with the on-premise environment used in other Funcional Health solutions, the team noticed significant results related to overall cost savings and the elimination of idle assets.
"We handle on average 48,000 requests every day in this service. In our on-prem infrastructure, scalability was limited vertically, forcing us to acquire more hardware, which proved detrimental in the end. Another advantage was that we halved this service's average response time."
—Alan Quinot, Tech Leader, Funcional HealthThe Bem Panvel Program ushered in an evolution in customer loyalty and increased adherence to chronic disease treatments by 30% as it reminds customers when they are running out of a drug. Besides this and increased support for care, the company noticed a 78% increase in upselling.
The direct impact on Funcional was also positive. The company expanded its portfolio by developing a digital loyalty solution targeting pharma retail customers, and using Google Cloud's solutions allowed it to cut monthly transactional costs by 17% compared with operations under the on-premise model.
"Bem Panvel's deployment was a watershed event for our customer loyalty programs thanks to the use of data and cloud technology. It provided advantages not just for Funcional and Panvel's business and relational structure, but also for those who need the drugs the most," says IPNET's Sales Manager.
In the future, Funcional Health aims to add more products and medicines to Bem Panvel Program's coverage while focusing on the company's in-depth digital transformation by making efficient investments in cloud services.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Funcional Health
With over 20 years in the market, Funcional Health strives to be recognized as a leader in transforming healthcare data into actions to provide companies with economic sustainability and people with improved healthcare.
About IPNET
IPNET Growth Partner supports its customers' digital transformation journeys in the cloud. It also prioritizes innovative solutions and optimized investments to provide excellent service delivery and add value to relationships.