HealthManagement, Volume 19 - Issue 5, 2019

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An overview of Affidea’s journey embedding digital tools across its network to orchestrate patient care and improve patient experience.

It was the airline industry which proved 60 years ago that through digitisation, airports could become more efficient and safer. Airports introduced the air traffic control technology which allowed them to swiftly transition from scheduling few hundreds of flights a day to managing millions of passengers every day. Thus, digitisation and automation have made them more efficient and safer for their customers.

Healthcare is now transforming to a more data-driven industry, where data can be used to continuously improve our daily operations, enhancing patient safety and delivering faster, better and more efficient care every step of the patient’s pathway.

The possibilities for digitising healthcare are endless – from access to throughput to quality care across the patient pathway.

At Affidea, we see 7 million patients every year, and every one of them is equally important to us. We understand their expectations about accessible, high-quality medical care and that’s why, we want to make sure they have the best possible care, delivered quickly, effectively and safely.

With the use of digital tools, we are monitoring the patient pathway from the first contact inside our centres. We have introduced KPI dashboards which are meant to offer our teams better insight around our operations, resulting in constant actions of quality improvement and overall improved patient experience.

Patient Experience Starts From the First Contact


We understand that the first contact with our centres is often the most important. We are establishing national call-centres across our network to ensure there is always an Affidea caregiver to answer any patient questions and help them with information when they need it most. We have managed to reduce lost calls from 40% to less than 5% in the countries where we operate national call-centres. This directly translates into increased access for our patients and higher patient satisfaction.

We have also started to digitise our patient consent forms which ensure the protection of our patient data and the strictest compliance to privacy regulations, while allowing our patients to manage their consent anytime, anywhere, in a secure, GDPR compliant way. This gives them convenience, and less time spent with paperwork in the centre, and allows them to go home faster.

Diagnostic Imaging Services With the Patient in the Centre of Everything We Do


Together with our clinical teams across the countries, we ensure that the examination is delivered at the highest quality in the shortest possible time. We connected our MRI scanners through a cross-border digital platform giving access to unified protocols and allowing us to monitor image quality as well as scan time and idle time. Continuously improving the way we do things, we kicked off a project in 24 clinics, providing better access for patients to MRI examinations, increasing by 14% the number of exams performed every month.

Reducing unnecessary procedures from the patient pathway, and eliminating waiting time is our focus when improving the patient experience. Data is analysed at different stages of the patient pathway inside our centres. However, the typical patient won’t even realise that these digital tools even exist, but they will experience less waiting time and faster and better care.

The potential to make a positive impact on patient and doctor experience is truly tremendous. This is the beginning of Affidea’s journey embedding digital tools across our network as a new way of orchestrating patient care and improving patient experience because we believe that nothing is more important than health.

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