Maccabi
            

Maccabi Healthcare Services is Israel’s leading HMO and one of the world's largest healthcare providers with 2.5 million members. Maccabi is recognized, both in Israel and abroad, as a unique and innovative healthcare system, which leads the way in cutting-edge medical technology, comprehensive and integrated computerized information systems, and sophisticated monitoring and evaluation tools. Maccabi operates more than 300 medical centers and clinics throughout Israel and employs more than 15,000 workers including ~5,500 physicians and ~1,500 nurses.

Maccabi is the leading Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in Israel. With a keen focus on innovation, and a decentralized services model, Maccabi helps facilitate health services for more than 2.5 million members throughout its network. As a result, digital services are exceedingly popular—with over 1.5 million members online and 500,000 using mobile apps.

But ongoing digital growth constantly raises new challenges around communication and knowledge management, siloed applications, and increasingly onerous processes and system complexity. With Software AG, Maccabi found a partner to help in its digital transformation.

By implementing webMethods as an integration platform, with Business Process Management capabilities, and the ability to connect and expose all legacy systems with ApplinX—Maccabi has turned its integration challenges into digital innovation built on speed, efficiency and agility.
In fact, with industry-leading integration on the backend, coupled with seamless user applications to handle healthcare services, Maccabi helped Israel become one of the first nations to vaccinate its residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Social distancing was critical during the pandemic, and an investment in technology coupled with an amazing partnership with Software AG literally saved lives,” says Guy Ram, CIO of Maccabi. “With up to 80% of medical visits able to take place virtually with video chat and mobile apps, people were able to get immediate care from home—and there was more space available at the hospital for those who needed to come in.”

Foundation for the future

Maccabi’s recent journey began almost ten years ago with a wholesale unification of its process management and integration systems. With webMethods as its integration platform, and ApplinX making legacy systems available to be used in modern apps, Maccabi was able to connect customer, partner, core business, and support systems. It also enabled better cooperation with the Ministry of Health (MoH) for reporting and two-way communication.

The innovation has been iterative, building on each success. It started with the Children’s World service, connecting patients and family docs with streaming video. Then it moved to better, more agile compliance with MoH regulations. And then a user-friendly electronic medical records (EMR) system encompassing digital referrals, lab results, consultations, and automatic patient alerts and reminders. Doctors saw faster payments too, and got access to a world’s first portal providing rapid SCORE and target LDL results.

From pandemic to innovation

Maccabi is like other smart organizations. What on the surface looks like good fortune—is usually the result of good planning. With a robust digital foundation, and a culture of consistent digital transformation, Maccabi was already a leader in Israel and the world when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

“While you can never predict what is to come, you can bet there’s always a surprise around the corner—and the best thing for that is to have the technology to be flexible, agile, and fast,” says Guy. “By the time COVID-19 hit, Maccabi had already initiated some video conference capabilities built into our EMR system, and virtual appointments for pediatric patients. Because we were so prepared, we only needed to extend our capabilities in order to offer large-scale virtual communication channels to all of our patients. Huge effort was invested to enable all this variety of channels in order to meet our patients different needs."

Maccabi was already offering seamless web and mobile apps for patients. Building on this foundation, with webMethods doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background, Maccabi was able to re-vamp those apps for life during the pandemic.

“If you need to make an appointment for vaccination, whether your first or second, get proof of vaccination to certify access to travel or certain public venues in multiple languages, check lab results—it is all done automatically through the self-service application,” Guy explained. “And of course, thanks to webMethods, we’re able to communicate everything that’s needed to the Ministry of Health, including statistics on numbers of tests, how many people are hospitalized, and more."

Best of all, the strengths that helped Maccabi help Israel during a global pandemic—are the same strengths helping its people afterwards: hybrid medical care, based on virtual and in-person visits, unified medical records that reduce errors and increase quality of care, and new ways to harness technologies like the Internet of Things to alert patients and their doctors to changes before a health emergency takes place.

That’s how Software AG and Maccabi are building a truly connected world of healthcare together. Improving innovation. Improving care. Improving lives.