Dr Lal PathLabs believes that the future of healthcare is going to be defined by a “PHYGITAL” patient journey, a combination of physical and digital infrastructure. The company is therefore betting big on technology investments without worrying much about immediate return on investment.Digital transformation is a journey which requires a lot of effort and resources in any organisation, feels company’s CFO Ved Prakash Goel, who has been a big backer of automation and digitisation.
“Today’s CFOs very well acknowledge that technology is the backbone of every business, including our diagnosis space. The more we emphasize contactless delivery and convenience, information technology becomes necessary, especially when you operate your business at scale. Moreover, IT adds value on both backend and frontend. We aim to create a perfect blend of emerging technologies, automation and digitization to maintain visibility, quality, process and integrity for PAN India presence,” Goel expressed.
As a CFO, Goel doesn’t prefer one to one linkage of their investments in digital and its return. He considers these tech investments for building the future, and as enablers for future growth.
“As we drive operational excellence and customer experience, there is always a scope for improvement. It is a journey. We have substantially increased our budgets this year and our endeavour is to execute the projects that we have taken up as a team. We have also augmented our IT resources by induction of fresh talent in the digital and IT function,” Goel said.
Recently, the company has launched a patient app to enhance customer experience by providing an easy to use Interface. They’ve set up a digital kiosk for registration and payments.
“Our commitment to digitise the organisation can be gauged from the fact that we have substantially increased our budgets on IT and Digital spends. In my capacity as the CFO, I ensure that the required funds are never a constraint for the right investments in these digital and automation projects that would help drive the future growth for the organisation. At Dr Lal PathLabs, we are working to create a future whereby the patient interactions are fully digitised, of course aided by human support wherever required” Goel highlighted.
Amplifying operational performance
Goel’s digital strategy is focused towards building a secure and scalable digital infrastructure to service Dr Lal Pathlabs’ patients, drive operational excellence by digitising the manual processes and providing a superior customer experience.
“Patients are center-staged in all our digital investments; however certain technologies like Robotics also helps us to optimise costs by digitising some manual processes. So, in summary, we are not focusing only on cost reduction as a prime outcome from our digital investments,” he describes.
Goel and his digital team are confident that they offer a seamless customer experience using digital automation. They are bound to get superior returns on their investments in digital in the long run.
He illustrates the nature of their services rendered by their physical interaction with patients, as it is impossible to automate sample collection which has to be performed by a trained phlebotomist.
“This physical touch, empathy and commitment to our patients is what differentiates us from others including online/aggregator kind of models. We are leveraging technology to improve operations but final service delivery is in physical mode only. We have smoothened our Home Collection bookings through web and mobile applications but to service the increased flow of orders, we have also strengthened our on ground phlebotomists force” he explains.
Talking furthermore about leveraging cloud technologies and data to drive automation in finance functions, Goel affirms, “these technologies are in use for few years now in DLPL, we have various APIs and tools that work seamlessly day in day out, be it for registration, payment collection, auto posting of accounting entries, automated MIS and reports. “
The management at Dr Lal PathLabs is committed towards digital transformation, Goel has rolled out new training interventions around IT policies and cyber security compliance which is mandatory for all his employees. “We are also conducting webinars on Digital automation to significantly enhance the Digital Quotient for our larger team. As an organisation, we are embracing this change with both hands” Goel concludes.
