What does digital transformation involve? For the Healthcare Insurance Reciprocal of Canada (HIROC), winner of this year’s DX Award in the Small Public Sector category, it has involved a focus on business intelligence in support of better outcomes when it comes to patient safety. It has also meant a huge focus on more adeptly leveraging the power of advanced data.
“We have undertaken a major transformation of its enterprise data warehouse, and as such have adopted new tools for business intelligence which have helped lead to major advances in reporting and analysis, and put the power of HIROC’s data at our staff’s fingertips,” said HIROC Digital and Innovation Strategist Arun Dixit.
“We are exploring opportunities to apply advanced analytical tools such as machine learning to solving complex and dynamic business problems, and unlocking even more value from our data assets in service of our staff and ultimately our subscribers.”
A big part of HIROC’s transformation has involved moving away from paper in its insurance renewal process.
“We used to be heavily paper-based, with reams of documents mailed out to our customers in big envelopes,” said HIROC Director, Information Services and Advanced Analytics Leo Dias. “We saw an opportunity to do something that had been on our minds for a long time – to go paperless in our insurance renewal process. It’s been a big step forward in efficiency and customer experience, and we’re definitely not going back.”
Security and cloud have also been key pieces in HIROC’s remarkable transformation.
“We’ve evolved our privacy and security controls, which has opened the door to safely adopting cloud solutions,” said Dias. “Over the last two years alone we’ve gone from having basically 100 per cent of our technology on-prem to adopting 10 cloud solutions. This has involved everything from software as a service to infrastructure.”
Technology, said Dias, is an enabler, “and we’re super excited about the customer experience impacts that are enabled by this digital progress that we’ve made.”
While HIROC’s leadership is happy with the progress that has been made so far, it has no intention of just standing around admiring its past successes.
“We will continue to explore and implement solutions that will help us provide even greater customer services in support of over 700 subscriber organizations, said HIROC Infrastructure Team Lead Duke Nguyen, “and to continue to ensure that we understand and respond to the insurance and risk management needs of our customers. We have adopted agile organization methodologies as well as tools for human-centered design, which allow us to continue to embed new beliefs and behaviors that drive innovations.”
