Meet Genesis – the company that innovated healthcare technology
By Andreea Nita (Maxcode) discussing with Damien Dennehy (Genesis) – The story starts 10 years ago when the now CEO Noel O’Hanlon was approached by a contact of his to help him manage his organisation’s healthcare inventory. Sensing a gap in the market, Noel founded Genesis Automation in 2010.
Genesis is a suite of modules that allows healthcare providers to carry out many of their business functions. These modules include Supply Chain Management/Inventory, Asset Management, Tissue Tracking, Point of Care, and several others. In a nutshell, a product in Genesis can be tracked and traced from ordering, to storage, to usage on a patient.
Following a year-long development period, Noel approached the first client, Plymouth NHS Hospital, with the solution. After a successful trial, Noel partnered with them and other NHS hospitals to expand the system around their requirements. Fast forward to today, where Genesis has grown immensely, being rolled out to many hospitals in Ireland and the US, and completing successful implementations in many UK NHS hospitals in the last five years.
Today there are multiple systems available to customers: a web solution, a mobile solution for hospital staff, an interface solution that enables integrations into third party systems (such as SAP, Oracle, Epic, Lawson), as well as an analytics suite that collates transactional data from the client’s system and offer reports with further insights into their data, for example busy periods throughout the year, or the most expensive department in a hospital.
Taking the pulse of the healthcare market
The healthcare market is very diverse, both internationally and regionally. No two customers are the same: one customer may have a new state-of-the-art hospital, while another customer may struggle with Wi-Fi issues. On an international level, healthcare also has very different policies (for example FDA guidelines which only apply in the US). Healthcare is also heavily deadline-focused – deadlines that are driven mostly by government or federal requirements.
So to what does Genesis owe its success to? Basically, thinking beyond a basic customer requirement and understanding the bigger picture. They are not afraid to look into and investigate the challenges of the market and of their clients, see the potential for change and improvements and bring it up for discussion. This way, they’re not just fulfilling a need, they are contributing to an evolving market and to openness within the healthcare industry.
And you know what they say: birds of a feather, they tend to flock together. Cue 2019 and Maxcode.
The beginning of a beautiful partnership
In 2019 Genesis planned on rebuilding their Interface solution to be a cloud-native, multi-tenanted solution. They tried to look several years in the future as to where they needed to be from a technical standpoint, and realised that their older solution did not scale to where they needed to be.
That said, it’s difficult for a business to build a new platform when they also need to adapt and manage a tremendous customer growth, which meant they would have to build integrations for customers in three different countries over the course of less than a year. And you can’t ask customers to wait a year while the business builds a new platform. They could have started building these integrations on the older platform, but they realised it would have been a tremendous technical debt that could not have been overcome in the future.
So the search for a partner for development started, meeting with companies that could help Genesis with the new integrations. Everything sounded good on paper, but something did not feel right. They soon realised, after meeting with several potential partners, that the most important value they were looking for was the ability to trust the partner and that was something they had difficulty finding.
After all, it’s easy to find a team of people that say yes to everything, and become just room echo of your own words. What Genesis was looking for were the same values they have: openness and transparency, open communication regarding what is working well or not is working well, as well as the courage to stand your ground and challenge others. And they found that in us.
They then met the Maxcode team in Iasi, and they could tell that their openness and their skillsets were exactly what they were looking for. They soon noticed that we all share the same agile mentality and the honesty that both companies value so much. And everyone realised from the beginning that the collaboration was destined to succeed.
As soon as the parameters were set, the Maxcode team moved on to help the company rapidly expand their API & Services team. Genesis doubled the team, then split it into two for parallel deliveries.
And the results can already be seen: with open communication, feedback and a lot of smart work, the agility of the team, as well as the quality of the deliveries, have improved immensely. The older solution was manually deployed and required extensive manual QA to validate. The newer platform is deployed automatically, and more than 1500 tests are executed on each version of the platform. Two Genesis customers have already gone live with the new platform, and two more are going live before February 2020, and the company has received very positive feedback on the turnaround time for changes – days where weeks were typical on the older solution.
The future
There is still work to be done, yet the fact that the ground was set from the beginning for an open channel of feedback and communication, as well as innovative technologies and challenging discussions, makes this a successful project already. The team’s involvement in healthcare as a domain is something close to the Maxcode values, as our developers are looking for more than just building beautiful apps, they are striving to change the world and bring useful functionalities to people that need them.
And the fact that we get to do this alongside a company that shares our mindset and goals is more than just an added bonus. It’s the secret ingredient to a successful partnership.