PrélèvExpress is a family business that has been providing outpatient medical sampling services for more than 22 year. A team of nurses meet with patients at home to take their blood and urine samples based on doctors' prescriptions. They then send the samples to the laboratory for analysis, then return the results to the doctors.
The company’s two owners were planning on growing their business for years, but had to postpone their plans with the arrival in COVID-19. However, the massive increase in the demand for their services encouraged them to quickly grow their nursing team, and expand their operating territory.
The paperwork and administrative tasks that are processed with Excel spreadsheets have quickly become bottlenecks for their business productivity.
And that’s why a digital solution that can keep up with their growth was necessary.
After doing our research, we came to the conclusion that most of PrélèvExpress’ needs can be met with an existing SaaS solution. The implementation costs plus the monthly subscription remained lower than the cost of developing a custom solution.
An efficient implementation of the chosen tools would enable the company to improve a large number of processes. However, certain functionalities were impossible to implement without the design of a custom application.
This hybrid solution allowed the country to get the best of both worlds.
The solution we developed for PrélèvExpress is comprised of three phases:
The former PrélèvExpress website belongs to the Jurassic period.
In addition to giving all the wrong impressions about the company, the website didn’t offer any of the features that PrélèvExpress needed to optimize their operations, and increase their online visibility.
Here’s a list of the new website’s features:
Based on PrélèvExpress' needs, we decided to design the website using the Wordpress CMS, which turned out to be an excellent choice.
In addition to saving time and lowering the integration costs, the user Wordpress interface makes it easier to modify the website without having to hire a developer. Even though building a website from scratch is better for flexibility and security reasons, using a CMS framework was the best choice for this project.
Once we decided on the theme we wanted to use, we started working on the design and the overall visual identity of the website.
Another key point to consider - which is still surprisingly too often overlooked in 2020 - is the website's responsiveness to different screen sizes.
From 2013 to 2019, website traffic from mobile devices increased from 16% to more than 53%. That’s why responsive design is a must.
Our custom application had two objectives:
Among other functions, the custom application automates the data entry for addresses and the preferred appointment time slots for customers. This saves the staff lots of work hours per week.
Also, the user interface extracts data from the optimized routes by the logistics application. This automatically creates new schedules and sends them to nurses with their route to be monitored on their GPS.
Below are some screenshots from the app:
The following are integrations that we’ve included in our solution to help our clients run their business more efficiently:
Booxi is one of several available appointment booking tools like Schedulista, Go Appointment, and other Wordpress plugins. The challenge in this project was to synchronize the schedules of up to 10 nurses. Another important need to consider was the different geographic locations of clients.
A final essential requirement was to have a French version of the interface, which surprisingly limited our options. We decided to go with Booxi, which in addition to meeting all our criteria, is a local company! In some cases, developing a tailor-made appointment scheduling platform is necessary. And PrélèvExpress wasn’t one of those cases.
With a database of more than 1000 patients initially compiled in an Excel spreadsheet, managing follow-ups and customer relations required lots of manual labor.
To simplify and automate the administrative and patient follow up tasks, we had to implement a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution.The challenge at this stage was to make sure that the data that was initially classified in a more or less structured way in the Excels files, was correctly interpreted in the CRM.
That’s why we needed to limit manual data entry as much as possible.
For this client —like with most SMBs we work with, Pipedrive CRM has been the winner. A big advantage of this platform is its ease of use.
It might sound obvious to you but a big complaint we’re getting from customers using other “off the shelf” CRMs (and even more complex ones), is that they don’t really help the user.
And that defeats the purpose of using a CRM in the first place.
After the customers schedule their appointments, the trajectories should be optimized to ensure maximum commuting time efficiency for the teams on the road. The solution was the integration of a logistics optimization software.
This piece of software compiles all the addresses grouped by sector and reconstructs an optimized route according to the time slot that’s booked by each patient.
When scheduling the appointment on the interface, the patient is notified by text message or email that the visit could happen 30 minutes before or after the scheduled appointment. This allows the software to best optimize the trips for maximum efficiency.
If a patient requires a specific time for their appointment, they can request it and the tool will take that into consideration. Directions are then sent to nurses' mobile devices who can simply follow GPS directions from one meeting to the next.
The company has doubled the number of their patient bookings.
Appointments geolocated by sector in synchronization with schedules allowed nurses to group their meetings close to each other. This drastically reduced costs related to vehicle use and salaries.
Given the increase in demand following the Covid 19 situation, the time factor was decisive in the success of this digital transformation project. It took us only 4 weeks to deliver this project.
Most of the nurses working time is now spent with patients rather than on the road. This increased their overall sense of accomplishment and appreciation for their work and their employer.
Patients can now book appointments easier and, as a result, their overall satisfaction and loyalty increased. The automation reminder system has also significantly increased client retention.
The efficiency of the system lowers the overall expenses and allows the company to invest more in a marketing strategy to grow the business and acquire more new customers.
