Pandemic Challenges & Innovations

Working remotely during pandemic times. And beyond.

Ecaresoft had won a deal with the biggest hospital in Saudi Arabia: Dr. Erfan & Bagedo General Hospital. We were going to implement both Cirrus & Nimbo as an holistic solution for the health network: Inpatient, Outpatient, pharmacy, revenue cycle management, and for the attached specialty clinics.

It’s a big project. Part of the plan was for me and other Ecaresoft team members to visit the hospital on site to have meetings with physicians, hospital officials and administrators to make an analysis of the current situation, scheme a work breakdown structure for the project and schedule the activities and resources needed to execute said project for the hospital. The issue is that the pandemic made it very difficult to go in (and even out) Saudi Arabia. I personally couldn’t, and it was my responsibility that the Nimbo parts of the overall project would get diagnosed & executed correctly.

My team and I had to do everything remotely. Some team Cirrus members were already in the hospital and helped with the mapping of the processes and the people that we should talk to in order for us to do our jobs. We had to analyze hundreds (literally) of clinical and administrative processes, understand the patient journey for more than 30 specialties, and then translate all this know-how into the Nimbo (& Cirrus) products. After that we were supposed to test it with the +400 physicians & +200 nurses that EBGH has. Remotely. It was no small feat, having team members on site did help but the rest was done through video-calls and on-line meetings with the chief staff and medical directors of the hospital for feedback and approval of everything.

Property of Ecaresoft.

So I worked with the Product Director of Nimbo on the process mapping detail of how Nimbo would solve & full-fill the processes for Outpatient in EBGH. After that, we scheduled several internal meetings and product demos with EBGH chief staff and medical directors to improve the workflow and understand what was missing. Once the workflow and process mapping detail was approved, the next step was what we called User Acceptance Tests. This ones were fun but draining. I had meetings with each specialty chief medical staff for Outpatient processes, since there is a time difference with Mexico I ended up having these meetings at 1am or 3am — sometimes even 4am. Like, do you sleep super early or do you just wait until that time with no sleep?

I tried it all. You get used to it, for me it worked sleeping super early the day before. After several UAT’s and feedback sessions, we were ready to start training the EBGH users before making the full product implementation and Go Live. This was it, the real test. There are a lot of physicians and with different time availabilities so if we wanted to cover up all areas and all physicians for Outpatient, I was going to need the help from my team. We ended up giving the trainings successfully, and this was my last work at Ecaresoft before moving onto my next adventure.

Product Innovations

Property of Ecaresoft.

The pandemic brought an accelerated growth to Nimbo. And we were ready. The Product Team ended up developing (in an impressive record time) the whole Digital Patient Life Cycle for a single physician, a group of physicians, a health network and even for Hospitals. This was big because the issue with the pandemic was: as healthcare providers, how might we continue to attend to our patients safely even when we have our hospitals & clinics full with COVID-19 patients?

We went on a mission of enabling as many health-networks as we could with the right tools. For a time our Customer Success team focused on helping our current client and user base let them activate the Telehealth modules so they could continue their work with their patients, in the mean time the Sales team went in search of clinics & hospitals that require to diminish the amount of walking patients so they could focus on-site on critical cases & on covid-19 patients while at the same time having the ability to serve patients online.

We also helped our clients and users generating on-line presence and traction, we provided them with a digital marketing service. That way they could be found on-line and with the Nimbo tools very easily continue the patient journey. The Nimbo solution became so much the norm of what a Digital Patient Management system should be that even Johnson & Johnson collaborated with us in innovation and technology to benefit more than 7,000 doctors in Mexico and Colombia.

I am amazed with the Product & Development team at Nimbo, they understood the task and executed it perfectly. At the same time im proud of my Customer Success and Sales Teams because they were able to find the right organizations to push in the industry in Mexico. We did real change.

Management Challenges

OKR format.

Over deliver, over communicate. That’s the rule for working remotely. We used the OKR format for the one-on-one meetings with each member of my teams. It worked because we could be focused on the progress, how they felt each week with their work, understand the obstacles and how I could help them, and how their results tied to the overall strategy for Nimbo.

We had meaningful conversations. For Sales we additionally applied a Performance Plan with the objective of becoming laser focused on the key metrics that each member needed to reach their quota. Additionally we had weekly area meetings: for Customer Success, for Sales and for Product Implementations.

For Customer Success we focused on:

1. Health monitoring: healthy levels of Nimbo usage
2. Retention & negative churn
3. CSAT & NPS

For Sales we focused on:

1. New Leads & Business Opportunities generated
2. Money on pipeline
3. MQL:SQL Ratio
4. New Sales
5. Accumulated Recurring Revenue vs the Goal

We didn’t focus on activity metrics for either area. We discovered that not only keeps us out of focus on what matters for the business and our clients but also burned out my teams. Maintaining activity just because isn’t productive, knowing which activities and what level of those brought results was better.

My teams also felt that they weren’t measured correctly and on what was representative of their work. It could grow resentment and unhealthy competition between them.

For Product Implementations I had to take a Program approach. Since it became progressively hard to have detailed knowledge of each Project at the meetings, I needed to develop a Scorecard that easily should the progress and current situation of each project my teams were taking on. And from that, schedule with them support activities or follow up tasks. We ended up with something like this:

Example Sheet of Program overview of projects.

It’s not exactly how we did it but I wanted to exemplify the concept. This way I could review each project before the meeting and ask specific questions so we could focus on problem solving at the meeting. It made it effective and my teams would learn how to make a brief for each project.

We ended up creating a Project Management structure at Nimbo. This meant that each new client (of a pre defined segment and size) was treated like a Product Implementation Project: We used a proven methodology, we assigned a project manager, we defined a scope & time for the project, and we collaborated with the client to establish KPI’s to reach. Each Project Manager could handle multiple projects and of different sizes, it also boosted NPS & CSAT scores. It was working and this transition made my teams more autonomous from me. Which is the point.

Customer Success also reached a high level of autonomy at this point. We transitioned to an Account Management style for each representative. They became managers for a group of users and a group of clients (which were strategic accounts). We embraced automation, bulk messaging & bots to manage 80% of the work load and dedicate the other 20% to direct contact with the clients or users that needed or required that service level. They became very good at identifying when and which users or clients needed that attention. Retention improved.

For Sales we ended up hosting several activities each Quarter to maintain or develop the skills required to become Prospecting Masters:

1. Internal Product Webinars: 101 on new functionality released
2. Prospecting for Outbound workshops
3. Design thinking workshop on new market segment & Jobs to be Done
4. Demo performance evaluations
5. Continuous training on Health terminology and context

My teams became autonomous, they were developing a sense of mastery on their respective crafts, and they found purpose on what we do. At this point I felt happy and grateful that we found meaningful work and meaningful relationships. And I felt ready to step out of my role at Ecaresoft.

So much left to do and many exciting challenges to come, but it was no longer my time. I am grateful and will always appreciate the people that I had the opportunity to work with, my mentors and the challenges that I was trusted with because with out them, I wouldn’t have found that I am a Predictable Revenue Profesional. And that this is what I want to do.