By Subarna Ganguly, EMEA Staff Writer
The pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of healthcare systems around the world. The telehealth space in particular, which provided a much-needed bridge to healthcare during the crisis, has seen significant growth, investment and transformation.
According to Rock Health’s ‘H1 2021 Digital Health Funding’ report, investment in the digital health space has doubled since 2019, skyrocketing to $14.7 billion in 2021. This uptick in investment, reinforced by regulatory changes and the evolution of customer preference, signals that the demand for virtual healthcare will continue.
Doctolib, a fast-growing e-healthcare provider based in France, has been a lifeline for essential services in unprecedented times. I spoke to Sebastien Louyot, CIO at the company, about Doctolib’s journey, the dynamic relationship between CIOs and CFOs today and the future of online healthcare services.
Can you start by sharing with us a little about Doctolib and your background?
Doctolib is a leader of online healthcare services in Europe. We have two main missions. First, we want to improve the daily life of healthcare professionals. We help them with digital solutions like booking management, teleconsultation and medical practice management. Healthcare professionals can save time, have more control at work and improve their revenues. Our second mission is to help patients have a better understanding and access to medical services. Currently, we serve more than 300,000 healthcare personnel users in three countries, France, Germany and Italy. And, we also serve 60 million patients in these countries.
On a more personal level, I’ve been in the IT industry for more than 20 years and have always been interested in tech innovations. I started my career in the telecom industry, building the first internet providers in France. I’ve also been an entrepreneur, creating an IT consulting and services company for businesses.
Our goal now is to continue expanding with new countries and new products, and to try to reach a new category of healthcare professionals.
You have experienced hyper growth in recent years in France and Germany. Can you tell us what the key drivers behind Doctolib’s success are?
First, we’ve been customer-obsessed since day one. I know it’s kind of a buzzword today to be ‘customer obsessed’ or ‘customer focused’. But I really mean it. Our founding team spent hundreds of hours sitting next to doctors in their practice to understand how they work and how we can help them with better software. We have built something we call the Doctolib community, with healthcare professionals, and they’re regularly involved in brainstorming with us about the new products and the new features we can launch. Second, I think we have a strong culture around operational performance. We believe that by continuously iterating on your process, by removing unnecessary friction, you can improve the way you work over time. And you can deliver a better service to your customers. This is key for us: not only delivering great software, but delivering great service.
Finally, with our agility and our customer focus, we’ve been able to adapt to the fast-changing world of COVID-19. And believe me, when the French government asks you to roll out vaccination software for more than 1,000 centres in less than a week, you definitely need to be agile.
You faced some unique challenges during the COVID-19 crisis and have recently started using Workday Innovation Services to mitigate some of those. Can you tell us about that journey and how it has impacted your business?
The main challenge we faced was to switch from a verbal culture to a written culture. Before the pandemic, we were mostly running our meetings with people in the same room. When everyone had to work remotely, we relied a lot on chat rooms and chatbots to keep the ball rolling on our various projects and to be able to deliver our products and our services to our customers. During the first lockdown, we decided to roll out Slack for the whole company which enabled us to have interactions with our regular tools via the same interface. And thanks to Workday Innovation Services, we were able to evaluate new ways to engage with HR tools. We tested Workday Assistant, the chatbot inside the Workday interface, which helped a lot of our managers tackle questions on how to manage their team. They were able to, for example, validate time-off requests directly from Slack which was a game changer in terms of process improvement.
With the pandemic, a lot of governments have accelerated their healthcare digitisation agenda and this is definitely something we are looking at in terms of international expansion.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare providers were forced to move online, almost overnight, but Doctolib had a robust infrastructure around online medical consultations in place years before. How do you plan to scale your digital presence, expand your growth and continue innovating?
If I look back in the mirror, over the course of the last three years, we moved from being a one-product, one-country company, with mostly a booking management system in France, to a multi-product, multi-country company. We’ve expanded from France to Germany, and now to Italy. We also recently acquired the number two player in the Italian market and launched new products like teleconsultation, medical practice management, and vaccination campaigns. This is a whole new way of addressing the market for Doctolib.
Our goal now is to continue expanding with new countries and new products, and to try to reach a new category of healthcare professionals. Because you don’t serve a doctor like you serve a dentist or a nurse.
They all have some really specific ways of providing healthcare. So we really need to fine-tune our software and our services to suit every kind of specialist provider. With the pandemic, a lot of governments have accelerated their healthcare digitisation agenda and this is definitely something we are looking at in terms of international expansion.
As a healthcare provider you deal with sensitive patient information, essentially storing them on Doctolib’s systems. How do you ensure data protection of your platform and fortify yourself against possible threats?
Security is our key topic. With the recent acceleration and visibility of Doctolib, it’s made us more exposed to attacks. We’ve invested massively in tools, in processes and in our people. We’re using only hosting providers which are certified for health data and Doctolib is ISO 27001 certified. We’re also using something called end-to-end encryption. It means that when you share sensitive information with your doctors with Doctolib, all the communication is encrypted which is an additional layer in terms of security. In terms of people, we have multiplied our security team by four over the last 18 months, and we’re still hiring more security experts. We also regularly perform external audits, pentests and bug bounty campaigns to find any potential breaches we may have. We’re aware that being 100% secure may not be feasible, but it’s our job to be as close as possible to that – and to really invest massively in security for our users, our patients, for doctors, and for Doctolib’s internal users too.
How has your role evolved and what in your view should be the top priorities for a CIO today?
This is something that sometimes keeps me awake at night and is definitely proving to be a great challenge. As a CIO, I need to make sure that the information system scales according to the fast growth of the company, that it keeps the company data secure, and that it can deliver the best value to our business. You need to transform from corporate IT to what I call IT-as-a-service.
This essentially means that the IT department must provide a catalogue of products and services that business users can consume by themselves. You need to remove frictions and blockers as much as possible to allow projects to be delivered at the speed of business change.
And to be able to do that, I see we have two main challenges today. The first is that you must ensure, as a CIO, that your technical foundations are strong. That’s why we invested a lot in changing our culture to a more dev-ops culture and in having a robust infrastructure. The second challenge is hiring. Hiring and training the key talent is the most challenging topic today. You need to onboard and keep the right people with the right skills to transform your information systems. And I’m not only speaking about technological skills. Having the right collaborative and agile culture is critical if you want to accelerate today. Talent hiring and talent retention is a key challenge for every CIO today.
IT is no more viewed as a support function but as a strategic asset to transform your business. The CIO and CFO must now co-develop an investment roadmap.
Do you think the CIO-CFO relationship has changed significantly today? Historically, the roles have been known to butt heads over cost control and budgeting. Do you find the dynamic has changed into more of a partnership?
Yes, I think so. IT is no more viewed as a support function but as a strategic asset to transform your business. The CIO and CFO must now co-develop an investment roadmap.
With the rise of the cloud, the IT budget has radically moved from capex to mostly being driven by opex. Consequently, this is shortening the touchpoint frequency between IT and finance. You’re not speaking about the budget once or twice a year anymore. As we need to adapt our strategy to the speed of business, we now need to speak on a monthly basis.
What in your view are the top three areas or strategies that CIOs and CFOs should collaborate closely on?
IT is a key partner to help the finance team digitalise their business processes. Digital signature, eprocurement, suppliers and contracts management, travel and expenses management are just some examples of how both IT and finance can improve the employee experience – and make the whole company more agile.
Every company is using more and more SaaS applications and this can impact your budget very quickly. If you rely heavily on SaaS, one of your priorities should be to have a SaaS management tool and to define the right guidelines and rules to keep SaaS usage in control. Some questions to be considered are, should all users have access to this application? Do you have several applications for the same business process?
Being aligned about the investment roadmap through financial planning and analysis is vital. I’m not only speaking about planning and reviewing the budget, but also sharing the vision and roadmap to better understand what impact every investment will bring to the company.
IT is a key partner to help the finance team digitalise their business processes. Being aligned about the investment roadmap through financial planning and analysis is vital.
