How we designed and developed a healthcare platform dealing with 250'000 invoices worth one billion CHF per year

A unique entity in Switzerland

To deal with the complex management of invoices between care providers and insurances, the canton of Vaud decided to put in place a unique solution in Switzerland: it created an intermediary entity called Centrale d'Encaissement des Etablissements Sanitaires Vaudois (CEESV). Its main role is on the first hand to ensure that care providers invoices are correctly flowed to the paying entities, and on the second hand to manage the paid back amounts to the care providers. Each year, more than 250'000 invoices worth about 1 billion CHF are transiting through the platform. Even more notably and despite the complex use cases, the CEESV is able to manage such an impressive flow with only 5 people.

A web application as central business tool

The core of the CEESV business and invoices management is its web application. It is a custom platform that enables the CEESV collaborators to carry out day-to-day operational tasks such as receiving and checking invoices, sending invoices to payers or receiving and processing payments and reimbursement. The development of the application still in use today started more than 7 years ago. As of today, OWT is still responsible for developing, maintaining and supporting this complex web application.

App modernization: making sure the application is always up to date

Through the years, the application has evolved to deal with the new business needs, technical updates and legal requirements. Indeed, keeping the app up to date in the fast-changing environment in which it is operating is crucial. To incorporate the new required functionalities or technical updates, a major release is performed every semester. However, after several years of good operations, an in-depth analysis was necessary to effectively modernize the application and plan the future evolution of the platform.

An in-depth analysis leading to a successful development

Thanks to our blueprint methodology, we defined the functional and technical scope of the next main updates. The analysis targeted several points of improvement such as

• Adaptation to new legal requirements: As of new legislation, the QR invoices will soon become mandatory and the BVR will not be accepted anymore. This change has a huge impact on the business of the CEESV, and its app needed to support this new process. In addition, this stream needed a close collaboration with the partners of the CEESV. The blueprint allowed to plan practically the implementation, making sure all the stakeholders were aligned.
• Better usability of the app: Another analysis aimed at improving the UX and UI of the application. As the development of the application started several years ago, the UX best practices evolved. Our UX experts redesigned the application in order to improve the usability and the user-centric design of the platform.
• Business needs improvements: From the interviews conducted during the blueprint, we could identify how some processes were currently done, and how they could be shortened and simplified. During the analysis, we also concluded that the integration with some third-party systems and services would save a lot of effort and time for the collaborators of the CEESV.
• Update of the technological stack: In order to simplify future development of the platform, a migration to the latest stable version of Angular was required. This evolution enables new functionalities from the latest version of the framework and reduces the development effort of the next releases. The blueprint allowed to estimate the development effort of the new streams and adaptations of the application. Finally, by defining the functional and technical specifications and a roadmap, we were able to start the development phase in the shortest terms.

Iterative Journey

• Interviews with the stakeholders to gather the users' needs
• Analysis of the impacts of the future evolutions
• Redesign of the platform
• Definition of the functional and technical specifications
• Estimation of the development effort and associated roadmap