Medifé deploys telemedicine for more than 320,000 members with Google Cloud’s help
About Medifé
Medifé is a nonprofit organization providing affordable, comprehensive healthcare insurance for more than 320,000 people in Argentina. It has 60 branches throughout the country, connecting customers with nearly 30,000 healthcare providers.
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About Zentricx
A Google Cloud Partner, Zentricx helps design, install, migrate, develop, and customize cloud environments for all kinds of companies to make them more scalable, flexible, and profitable.
Supported by Zentricx, the company developed its Cam Doctor platform to ensure the delivery of healthcare services during the pandemic and reduce wait times in offices.
Google Cloud results
- 300,000+ remote appointments held
- 95% of patient needs are successfully meet in the first telehealth session
- Over 10% of medical checks are performed through the telehealth service
- 100% platform availability
Handles over 30,000 remote appointments per month
Argentinian healthcare company Medifé trusted Google Cloud with its telemedicine development. Supported by Zentricx, the organization provides care for more than 320,000 people in Argentina.
Focusing on providing quality telehealth services, the company set out to tackle the challenge of providing uninterrupted healthcare access during the COVID-19 pandemic and its extensive lockdown periods while avoiding exposing patients to infection.
Medifé also wanted to monitor COVID-19 cases and ensure patient care and their swift recovery - including in some remote areas, where telemedicine is the only easy means of accessing healthcare - by integrating mobile and web apps to create a true solution ecosystem, whose prime aim was to facilitate equitable access to healthcare for all members.
"During the most critical lockdown phases, we had more than double the number of remote appointments as usual, with monthly peaks of 30,000 appointments."
—Facundo Trillo Quiroga, CIO, MediféA platform to meet every need
To meet high demand levels, Medifé opted to add Google Cloud tools supported by partner Zentricx. This allowed it to scale quickly, ensure uninterrupted healthcare and provide quality services during virtual appointments.
According to Medifé, its agile, highly scalable platform is possible thanks to solutions such as Firebase, BigQuery, and Google Workspace. The cloud infrastructure supports the patient service layer and consolidates all patient, physician, and provider data. The company has also managed to merge its pre-existing systems into a single environment.
All these tools have allowed Medifé to increase productivity for its working teams and healthcare professionals, improve patient care, and even reduce distances between healthcare facilities and patients.
For many patients, telemedicine has meant not just the ability to continue treatment and analysis, but also associated benefits such as avoiding unnecessary trips to large urban areas.
"One of the drawbacks of telemedicine was that people didn’t know about it, and the pandemic put us through our paces. If you test a tool and it works well, you’ll obviously choose it again."
—Ludmila Staghezza, Head of Marketing, MediféSince deploying its Cam Doctor platform, Medifé’s satisfaction levels have been between 4 and 5 on a 1-to-5 scale. It has also managed to meet 95% of patient needs in the first telehealth session with an average wait time of 1 minute.
As a result, the platform enabled a reduction of over 500% in wait times for members.
A partnership that brings results
A strategic partner like Zentricx has been essential to obtain the knowledge needed for a project such as Medifé’s, which challenges the business’s status quo.
After six months of implementation, Medifé launched its virtual care platform for walk-ins, and it added all services, specialties, and patients nine months later.
Today, the platform has around 100 concurrent internal users and over 320,000 external users. It conducts more than 30,000 telehealth sessions per month.
Google Cloud’s solutions have allowed Medifé to manage the serverless platform architecture with high availability and a 99.9% uptime rate - the minimum established in the service level agreement for the tools used.
"Google Cloud is very scalable. Consequently, and thanks to tools such as Cloud Healthcare API and Apigee, we have managed to improve many features in the healthcare ecosystem."
—Diego Tuero, CCO, ZentricxAs for infrastructure costs, developing a cloud platform allowed Medifé to optimize investment levels and divert resources to new innovations for its members and providers.
Future challenges for telemedicine
After adopting the latest adaptable, versatile, and flexible technology it needed, along with the capabilities of Google Cloud’s analytical tools, Medifé is taking on new challenges.
For this Argentinian company, the post-pandemic has ushered in a paradigm change that cannot be ignored. Patients began using telemedicine out of need, but ended up adopting it because of its benefits.
There is also the ability to obtain transparent, accessible information thanks to the deployment of digital clinical histories, as well as time and money savings by eliminating the need to go to healthcare facilities.
For Trillo Quiroga, “tech integration with tools allowing greater equity and more democratic healthcare will be increasingly necessary” to allow more people to access healthcare from the comfort of their home or wherever they might be.
"We’re working on it. Having a robust, scalable platform with Google Cloud’s support allows us to go forward with an innovative roadmap with many new features, designed to improve our members’ experience," says the CIO.
That is why Medifé can consider adding more Google Cloud tools in the future to help improve patient experience.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Medifé
Medifé is a nonprofit organization providing affordable, comprehensive healthcare insurance for more than 320,000 people in Argentina. It has 60 branches throughout the country, connecting customers with nearly 30,000 healthcare providers.
About Zentricx
A Google Cloud Partner, Zentricx helps design, install, migrate, develop, and customize cloud environments for all kinds of companies to make them more scalable, flexible, and profitable.