Private Healthcare Boosts Leadership with Technology Transformation

Our customer, a FTSE 250 company, is the largest private healthcare provider in the UK and has continued to grow with the acquisition of 38 hospitals and the development of a number of healthcare clinics.

Our customer has experienced some natural challenges in parallel with their growth agenda as costs have continued to rise whilst the organisation started to fall behind some of its competitors in terms if the digital transformation agenda and patient proposition. They desired to retain its market leadership position but also continue to grow revenues and overall market share.

Through 2023, patient numbers and revenue continued  to grow broadly in line with the growth of the private healthcare market following the pandemic and the inability of the NHS to fulfil with historically high levels of demand. Despite several substantial improvement initiatives however, our customer overall market share remained relatively flat, if even suffering a mild decline. It was felt that perhaps they were falling behind the competition in terms of service offering and ease of doing business with, both from a patient and consultant partner perspective and needed additional support to maintain and build upon it market position.

As a response, the organisation’s leadership team commissioned the development of a new strategy, centred around technology-driven operational improvements. In order to meet this ambitious new strategy, the Board made a significant financial commitment to a 5-year programme of change including the transition to a new IT operating model.

As with many enterprises adopting such and ambitious programme of change, they faced with delivering the existing portfolio of transformation initiatives whilst also having to establish how it would support this new portfolio. Not only did this present a challenge in terms of alignment across the different programmed and projects, but also alignment in terms of resource allocation across multiple interdependent projects.

Secondly, with the Board signing-off on the agenda, there was significant time pressure to launch a series of new value streams as part of a transition to a new IT Target operating model  (ITOM). The initiation of the new value stream, and the transition to the new ITOM naturally served as a significant distraction to the ongoing programme delivery function.

Thirdly, there was a fundamental lack of capacity and capability within the organisation to deliver the scale and complexity of change demanded by the business. The IT / change organisation was not resourced sufficiently to support the delivery of the existing change portfolio, transition to the new value stream structure and IT operating model whilst also initiating the programmes under the new agenda. They suffered from legacy ways of working in an organisation with relatively low turnover and a lack of fresh approaches and thinking around IT delivery. Like many businesses, there was a sentiment that the IT function was holding the business back from modernising the way it delivered care. 

Therefore, the organisation needed to find a way to reconcile the current change portfolio with the new IT transformation agenda whilst also designing and embedding the new IT operating model and required external expertise to support this. 

Project One were asked to support the Head of Programme Delivery by providing key Programme Leads to deliver the complex business critical programmes. These roles were also responsible for defining and shaping their respective delivery portfolios, working across the delivery structure to negotiate the use of competing resources. 

By fielding the right type of profiles, Project One was able to stand up a heavyweight team of programme leads, able to quickly get a firm  grip of the respective change portfolios and understand the phasing and scale of mobilisation projects.  

Once on the ground, the team were able to fully embed themselves within the organisation, working closely with the Head of Delivery, Senior Management Team and respective ExCo sponsors.  

In mid-2023, the new IT target operating model was unveiled to support the our customers’ Delivery team’s move towards more scaled agile ways of working organised around Product teams, led by Product Managers and supported by Product Owners. This re-organisation was aimed at addressing existing challenges within the previous organisation set-up, including spans of control, alongside improving the capability to deliver prioritised initiatives. 

The Project One team delivered very tangible business– critical programmes across the Patient Pathway designed to improve the quality of service patients receive. These included: 

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. This ambitious programme of work set out to make a fundamental shift in the organisation’s PCI compliance posture given the recent high-profile instances of data breaches at multinational organisations. As part of this, the Project One team supported the selection and transition to a new payment service provider, configuration of the required back-end systems and front-end hardware and training of end users in the new technology. This programme of work greatly enhanced the level of patient data security and reduced the level of bad debt leading to better outcomes for patients and shareholders alike, mitigating significant enterprise risks. 

• Private Medical Insurance online booking. This centred on the introduction of the first fully online private medical insurance consultant booking service revolutionising the way patients can choose and book appointments with specialist consultants. This required negotiation with the private medical insurance providers as well as other third parties to deliver a seamless booking experience for patients. 

Project One value Add:  

• Project One were able to field a mature and composed team of change professionals who could fill the significant capability and capacity gaps in the transformation portfolio 

• We brought a unique value proposition – a small team of experienced change professionals who could hit the ground running and fill the immediate leadership gaps in the organisation whilst also act strategically to identify and plan for the future needs of both the business and the IT organisation 

• Project One differentiates itself from other consulting firms through the type of change professional we are to deploy and our ego-less approach to transformation. 

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theteam@projectone.com