Keralty drives its comprehensive care model along with Google Workspace
About Keralty
Keralty is a group of companies with a comprehensive care model to provide healthcare and well-being. The group ranked second in the 2020 Merco Empresas Ranking for the healthcare industry and 22nd in that year’s edition of Colombia’s Corporate Superintendence’s ranking of the country’s largest companies.
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About Xertica
A leading company in Latin America with the highest degree of specialization in Google’s ecosystems.
Collaborative tools are helping the company accelerate to a comprehensive healthcare model.
Results
- Nearly 3 million virtual appointments in Colombia during the first year of the pandemic.
- 46,210 remote radiology sessions in Mexico
- 5,000+ physicians registered for virtual appointments
- 25,000+ employees connected to their jobs during the pandemic
- 14,686 Google Workspace licenses granted
300,000+ remote appointments held every month during the pandemic
Keralty, one of the world’s largest healthcare groups, is navigating one of its main challenges since its inception, as it needs to modernize its infrastructure to achieve a comprehensive healthcare model based on customized service, care, trust, and working alongside patients from their first appointment.
In a context where healthcare is a major issue for millions of people, Keralty realized it was time to take a step further and accelerate the process to adopt cloud-based tech tools to help it improve care, optimize processes, and increase working team productivity.
With caring for what’s important—people—always in mind, the company sought to innovate using Google Workspace’s solutions. Thanks to Xertica’s help with deployment, the healthcare group managed to handle 300,000+ remote appointments every month.
This strategy brought many challenges, and the most important one was not losing sight of the company’s essential goal: deploying a comprehensive care model, i.e., a system that goes beyond health considerations to comprehensively meet people’s biological, psychological, and social needs, and empower families and communities.
To do this, Keralty needed a comprehensive collaboration tool that allowed it to beef up remote connections for its 25,000+ employees. The group wanted to connect people, families, communities, and its own healthcare teams in remote areas with specialist healthcare teams. The aim was to enable them to access appropriate, quality diagnostics and treatments, based on the best evidence, using tools such as telemedicine and remote radiology, monitoring, education, and rehabilitation.
Keralty also needed to optimize the use of video conferencing, forms, and collaborative work in the cloud to improve everyday employee performance. The idea was to strengthen virtual communication, avoid unnecessary trips, save time and costs, and ensure information was handled securely in the cloud.
First steps in the cloud
Convinced that technology could make a great contribution to healthcare management, Keralty assessed several potential digital tools. To choose the one that met its need for innovation, the company focused on three aspects: overcoming operational-system hurdles, reducing costs and operational times, and improving conditions for online patient care.
During the pandemic, being close to patients became fundamental for Keralty. Many of its more than 10,000 registered physicians began offering virtual appointments in early 2020.
In this respect, Google Workspace’s tools have proved crucial to maintain contact with people using Meet’s video conferencing. As explained by Santiago Thovar, Keralty’s Global Chief Information Officer, Google Workspace provides the ability to take new steps toward innovation thanks to artificial intelligence solutions, one of the main trends in cutting-edge tech.
“One of the goals of working with Google Workspace is starting to use data to get smart clinical records. And the relationship between patients and healthcare services tends to improve with technology as well.”
—Santiago Thovar, Global Chief Information Officer, KeraltySergio Martínez, Keralty’s Global CEO, highlights the importance of being omnichannel in the future of the healthcare industry, as this allows the company to deliver end-to-end healthcare without losing information when switching communication channels.
“Our main differentiator is that the physician treating a patient in a healthcare center is the same one they will see on Meet, or chat with, and the same one prescribing treatments and sending prescriptions. It’s a single system that can be both physical and virtual, connecting all data.”
—Sergio Martínez, Global CEO, KeraltyFor the organization, this also means building a relationship of mutual trust, as physicians cannot conduct physical checkups during virtual appointments, and, therefore, patients take on a more important role in providing details of their symptoms and other information relevant for their own care.
Google Workspace’s tools have allowed Keralty to provide quick, effective answers to help with patient care, improve their experience, and avoid unnecessary trips. For chronic-patient programs, especially using video conferencing, healthcare professionals can provide guidance on any issue, and offer suitable solutions for users and members.
Toward digital transformation
Adopting Google Workspace has proven essential for both patients and physicians. To date, Keralty has held more than 2,970,000 remote appointments in Colombia, or around 300,000 appointments every month—a remarkable increase, considering that the organization handled about 1,000 remote appointments per month before the pandemic.
The patients’ adaptation to the new care formats has also been a satisfactory process for Keralty that brought big challenges. For example, medical authorizations, filling prescriptions, and discharges are among the processes patients can now get without needing to go to healthcare centers. This has also meant a chance to help protect people against COVID-19 by enforcing social distancing measures taken by local governments without affecting their healthcare.
This has led to reducing distrust of topics such as virtual healthcare, and creating the integrations needed with Google Workspace’s APIs to automatically schedule appointments in Calendar and send emails with links to the appointments. In this regard, Santiago Thovar added that the tools have also “allowed us to improve collaborative work between professionals and hold more virtual meetings to stay connected with cross-functional work teams.”
Another opportunity brought by adopting Google Workspace has been an accelerated adoption process for remote radiology. The company held 46,000+ remote radiology sessions in nearly a year in Mexico alone, between March 2020 and January 2021, with almost 5,500 physicians adapted to the new format.
As pointed out by Sergio Martínez, Keralty seeks to “take care of people, communities and the environment. This level of awareness is not very common in our industry, and one of the things you see most often is companies using paper. This is why we have developed a paper-usage reduction program with help from cloud tools.”
Thanks to the adoption of cloud solutions, that program reached its goals for the next five years in just one year, saving extraordinary amounts of paper. This also means a change in the company’s consumption habits and healthcare culture—both physicians and patients have naturally taken to using digital documentation.
Google Workspace has also had a significant impact on business scalability. By using the tools, with 14,686 Google Workspace licenses granted, the company made positive economic impacts—it reduced the number of phone extensions for its work teams by delivering instant communication and video conferencing tools to drive two-way communication between those teams inside the organization. To date, 671 phone extensions have been returned, reducing monthly expenses.
The road to comprehensive healthcare
Looking ahead, Keralty wants to incorporate more digital tools to improve healthcare, focusing at all times on one of its core values: understanding patients as more than just a health condition, seeing them as people, with a history and living conditions that are essential to understand their health problems and improve their quality of life.
“Google Workspace allows us to work easily and collaboratively with the entire organization in a single place, which improves productivity for everyone,” remarked Santiago Thovar.
Keralty believes telemedicine will keep evolving by integrating remote monitoring tools and including cross-functional experts or patient caregivers in appointments, so the company can improve coverage further to encompass more specialties from different regions, reach more distant communities without access to healthcare, and optimize remote-monitoring and remote-rehab processes.
Similarly, regarding remote expertise, Keralty expects to increase emergency-related processes to optimize observation and service-resolution times. Interactive and non-interactive modalities will be optimized using several specialties.
Consequently, one of Keralty’s upcoming projects is adopting Google Workspace at its healthcare centers in the USA. This international move is part of a robust project to manage the healthcare of the nearly 5 million Latin Americans residing in that country. To date, the company has deployed Google Workspace’s solutions in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, Brazil, and the Philippines.
“For me, Google Workspace represents simplicity, collaboration, and value.”
—Sergio Martínez, Global CEO, KeraltyTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Keralty
Keralty is a group of companies with a comprehensive care model to provide healthcare and well-being. The group ranked second in the 2020 Merco Empresas Ranking for the healthcare industry and 22nd in that year’s edition of Colombia’s Corporate Superintendence’s ranking of the country’s largest companies.
About Xertica
A leading company in Latin America with the highest degree of specialization in Google’s ecosystems.