Case Study

Global Healthcare Non-Profit Enhances its Operational and Financial Agility through Automated Workflows

Healthcare
Low-Code/No-Code

About the Client​

Our client is a renowned global non-profit healthcare organization known for its pioneering medical services and impactful advocacy serving over 2M beneficiaries across 46 countries. Since 1987, the organization has cared for millions of individuals facing complex healthcare challenges. Its innovative care programs consist of advanced treatment and therapies that were delivered ‘regardless of the ability to pay’. This has been its true hallmark of success, enabling our client to reach vulnerable communities across the globe.

Business Challenge​

The client creates and implements new programs in communities across the U.S. and abroad. Each requires detailed proposals that outline the activities, scope, intended outcomes, beneficiaries, resources, timelines, and more. Every program proposal runs through an exhaustive evaluation and review process. Selected programs require detailed project plans, milestones and impact measures that are approved by Functional and Financial stakeholders.

The proposal documents are just a part of the initial planning phase. Other documents such as business requirements, stakeholder analysis, and risk management plans follow a similar exhaustive review and approval journey. Following the initial planning phase comes program initiation, succeeded by the complex stages of execution, monitoring, control, and ultimately closure.

In all, there are at least 30 different documents for every single program. Cumulatively, the organization deals with several thousand different documents annually. Each is manually tracked for version control, reviewed, and approved, which impacted the effort involved in program processes, delays and associated overheads.

Trigent Solution

Trigent’s assessment began with an in-depth analysis of the client’s existing processes and IT infrastructure. We engaged in detailed interviews with key stakeholders to uncover inefficiencies and pain points, meticulously documenting each issue.

The following conclusions were drawn:

Business workflows and approval processes needed to be accelerated, while retaining the rigor in program evaluation, data capture and due diligence.

Acceleration can be realized by switching from Email exchanges and asynchronous interactions to a comprehensive document workflow automation solution.

Automating the workflow of the entire lifecycle of the document —right from its creation, review, approval, storage, and retrieval —paves way for rapid care program implementation.

A case for low-code/no-code

  • In its evaluation, Trigent realized the need for a unified platform, one that must serve multiple processes such as program proposal creation, review and approval automation, and allowing secure storage and easy retrieval.
  • As client’s operations scaled to new countries and innovative programs that required custom workflows or localization, the platform should allow for easy modification and workflow extensions that could be handled by the client’s IT team.
  • The platform should empower non-technical users as well as external stakeholders (lawyers, donors, and regulators) to participate in the creation and management of document workflows.
  • Finally, the platform implementation must ensure a low total cost of ownership, in which case, newer functionalities can also be added in short sprints.

Trigent’s Recommendation

With these above considerations, Trigent recommended the implementation of a low-code/no-code solution – one that can be easily implemented, user-friendly, customizable and cost-effective.
  • Microsoft Power Automate was chosen for its robust automation capabilities with a high degree of customization. This also helped the client to fully utilize their existing investment in Microsoft 365 Enterprise Licenses.
  • Sharepoint Online is highly customizable for document creation, storage, and approval. It can be configured to set up custom metadata, role-based permissions, and automated document versioning.
  • Power BI was chosen for its advanced reporting and analytics capabilities. It also seamlessly pulls in data from Power Automate and Sharepoint, converting them into ready reports.
  • Adobe E-sign was chosen for its legal compliance, and robust security, among other features such as its superior compatibility with the above tools.

Implementation Highlights

Trigent developed 30 individual custom document templates in Sharepoint that reflected its purpose. The end-users can simply input their information in the predefined fields without having to create a document from scratch.

The template and predefined data fields ensured that all essential data was captured, in the desired format and free of errors. Incomplete proposals became history.

After the template is filled out, Power Automate triggered an approval workflow routing the document to appropriate stakeholders for approval.

Whenever edits were made during the review process, SharePoint automatically created new document versions. Thus all document changes were recorded and stakeholders can access previous versions if needed.

The Sharepoint dashboard provided a real-time overview of each document’s status. The centralized repository allowed stakeholders to quickly access relevant information.

Trigent used Power BI to pull in real-time data and present them in a visual format. The reporting tool was also configured to track KPIs related to the business workflows. This included metrics such as number of documents processed, time taken for approvals, and compliance rates.

Client Benefits

  • The solution implemented gave our client much-needed visibility into business operations, allowing them to oversee all workflow processes in real-time.
  • Document standardization ensured that all the data were accurately captured and presented for easy analysis and approval.
  • Processing times reduced by 67%, there were zero manual errors or incomplete proposals that resulted in minimized administrative overheads.
  • The centralized repository and document versioning capabilities gave the client a single source of truth ensuring that all the users access the latest versions of documents.
  • The automated workflow enabled the client to focus its resources on mission-critical activities rather than on time-consuming administrative tasks.
  • Faster program execution directly translated to efficient cash flows leading to greater financial agility.