Auckland Eye is a private ophthalmology clinic offering the widest range of subspeciality services in eye care. With a team of 140 staff, and practices located in Remuera, Ormiston, Takapuna, New Lynn, Pukekohe, Whangarei and Queenstown, Auckland Eye aims to be the leading premium eye care provider in New Zealand.
Poor application performance hampers customer experience
When Oscar Batucan joined Auckland Eye as Head of Technology, most of his time went into ‘firefighting’ rather than taking the growing company’s systems to the next level. “The big problem was speed and stability of our key line-of-business application, VIP. With most time going into keeping systems stable and performing as they should, there wasn’t time for strategic initiatives.”
Poor application response impacted clinical operations and customer experience. “For example, you have ophthalmic technicians testing patients and entering results into the system. Those results are reviewed by our specialists. If the system isn’t performing, there’s a delay. And there isn’t much time between appointments.”
User experience, notes Batucan, wasn’t ideal – not for patients, not for technicians, and not for Auckland Eye’s doctors. “As we’d doubled in size over three years, we realised part of the problem was our incumbent managed services provider. They weren’t equipped to support a business of our size. This became clear, after working with the VIP application’s vendor and our previous managed services provider to improve stability.”
Testing the market
There was a lengthy process evaluating service providers with an eye (so to speak) not just on technological capability but cultural fit. Auckland Eye chose CodeBlue. “A couple of things stood out, including the lengths CodeBlue went to understand our business and the issues we were facing. We work in a partnership model and we want a managed services provider we can trust and work alongside. And of course, capability and price are factors too.”
Among the advantages offered by CodeBlue is its Virtual Private Server (VPS) cloud service and integrated Disaster Resiliency Service (DRS), locally hosted and directly supported by CodeBlue itself. This service has proven invaluable in addressing the performance and reliability issues suffered by Auckland Eye’s VIP application. As Batucan makes clear: “CodeBlue VPS is a godsend. It gives us the sort of direct control which isn’t possible with a hyperscale provider like Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS).”
However, Batucan says there is some nuance involved, as Auckland Eye pursues a hybrid cloud strategy. “As CodeBlue also offers Azure capabilities, it means we get the best of both worlds. Our key application stays close to home, with other services where appropriate going into the global cloud.”
A lean operation, backed by quality support
Having a reliable and dependable managed services provider is essential for Auckland Eye’s lean approach to IT. However, before CodeBlue got involved, Batucan says the situation wasn’t ideal. “It was a bit chaotic to be honest, as our previous provider wasn’t up to the task. With the migration, we realised documentation was lacking, as well as best practice process. That’s all changed now, and it started with the migration itself,” he explains.
He describes that process as smooth, with CodeBlue providing clear expectations to Auckland Eye. When last minute challenges cropped up, he says CodeBlue stepped in and made allowances. “It got hairy,” laughs Batucan, “Not so much skeletons in the closet but entire zombies with, for example, some uncatalogued cloud assets appearing which had to be dealt with.”
Through a collaborative effort, everything went to plan. “Now, we have a provider offering a breadth of expertise and capability which you couldn’t expect from our team of three.”
Focusing on value-added IT
As an IT leader who sees technology as a lever for business improvement, he says the stability of the company’s systems and support are primary benefits, but there is much more to it. “I like understanding the problems and challenges faced by people in the business. Now that I’m not worrying about application stability or tech support, there’s time to focus on becoming a specialist in medical IT. And that means adding more value to the business.”
He says management teams describe the performance of VIP as ‘snappier’, noting that this has positively impacted the clinical experience for doctors and technicians, and by extension improved patient experience. “That’s augmented by the services we get from CodeBlue. ‘No news is good news’ when it comes to IT support and hosting, and that’s what we have now. Even small things like self-service password resets make a difference. When your role goes from firefighter to IT innovator, you can achieve much more.”
Among those things are focusing on the emerging role of artificial intelligence and building a data and analytics capability, which could significantly benefit Auckland Eye in due course. “We even have time now to build an intranet,” smiles Batucan. “Twelve months ago, there’s no way that would happen.”
