Jean-Marie DEVERDirector of CIEMCIEM needed true partners to update its software programs to keep up with its constantly evolving business while building provision into them the senior executives’ increasing constraints. The Astek/Eurodecision partnership was remarkably successful for CIEM as their contributions were decisive for the development of the extremely powerful tools that CIEM now has to conduct its present and future business.
Claude SAAMProjects Director - ASTEKOur analysis of CIEM’s specifications convinced us that we needed additional expertise to submit a comprehensive and relevant solution. We acted on a recommendation to contact Eurodecision mathematicians and decided to create a technology partnership to meet CIEM’s requirements. As a result, we were awarded the tender.
CIEM is a preventive medical center created in 1961 that organizes health check-ups for CEOs and senior executives of 2,000 companies to make the earliest possible diagnoses of potential diseases that could affect their performance.
CIEM plans one-day consultation appointments (or half-day appointments depending on the executive’s schedule) once a year, on average three months ahead. During these check-ups, its contractual physicians conduct a set of examinations to ensure that the patient is in good health: blood test, urine analysis, stress tests, ultrasonography (CIEM has a highly efficient analysis laboratory), consultation follow-up with an internal medicine specialist, cardiologist and gynecologist, to interpret the examination results and provide valuable healthcare counseling.
The center organizes up to 2,000 appointments per month on behalf of several thousand patients factoring in the physical, organizational and scheduling constraints of both the specialist physicians and the patients. It was gradually becoming harder to solve this multiple variable equation using CIEM’s former IT system. What is more, it did not take into consideration the preferences of this upmarket patient population.
As part of its IT system review, CIEM decided to draw on the expertise of Astek, the computer services company, and Eurodecision. The latter forged a technology partnership to submit the most comprehensive and relevant solution to CIEM to win the tender.
Astek developed a web application to manage the medical center administration: all the data entry about the companies, patients, payments for the check-ups, etc. Eurodecision supplied the LP-Scheduler scheduling engine that Astek integrated into the application to automate appointment bookings and make relevant proposals to reconcile patients’ preferences with the center’s constraints.
Result: the tool takes one minute to schedule the appointments for a month, and is capable of rescheduling an appointment proposing several potential time slots when requested by a patient.
CIEM can increase the number of appointments scheduled in a week as examinations that were previously made exclusively in the morning can now be spread across the day thanks to this improved management. Finally, the center’s overall management has also improved for the patients, as their preferences are more efficiently administered, and for CIEM staff who no longer squander time checking appointments and can be assigned to higher added-value tasks.
