Challenge

Omnichannel Calls for a Modern AppDev Approach

Christelijke Mutualiteiten ("CM") is the largest of five competing Belgian health insurance funds with four and a half million members—roughly half of the country's citizens. The company acts as patients' representative with healthcare providers and administers claims, payments, and social assistance for its members, within the Belgian state's compulsory health scheme.

CM describes itself as a "dynamic social movement," rather than just an insurance institution, a claim warranted by its 70,000 volunteers who provide social care assistance in their communities.

Established in 1906, CM has an extensive network of around 500 branches so that members never need to travel far to access CM services. But more recently, with an eye to the future, CM has invested significantly in improved digital experiences to meet the changing preferences of its members.

The quest for world-class digital experiences placed an increasing burden on CM's IT organization, which was struggling to keep up with demand, as Chief Architect, Peter Van Maele, explains.

Peter's search for faster, modern application development methods brought him to OutSystems, and following an extensive evaluation, CM became an OutSystems customer in mid-2018.

Solution

Year One—Building Foundations

CM has hundreds of applications and around 300 developers. The business case for adopting OutSystems depended on wide scale adoption—this was not about building one or two urgent things fast. "Our first year was about establishing foundations," explains Peter.

CM needed a governed, architectural approach that would maximize the reuse of components. Scalability and security were crucial, given the financial details and health data it processes for millions of customers.

OutSystems partner Providit provided training and advice on software architecture. Meanwhile, Rebecca Debaillie, Director of ICT, started building CM's internal OutSystems development capability.

The first strategic application that the team developed was "Care Volunteering," an Uber-like application that assigns social-care tasks, such as home visits and medicine deliveries, to CM's 70,000 volunteers.

Built by an agile team of seven, including two OutSystems developers, this web portal and mobile-friendly web app for volunteers enables CM to manage clients, care requirements, and volunteers and even provides required reports to the Belgian social services department. External volunteer users gain secure access to the system thanks to integration with Belgium's eID service.

"Development involved integration to back-end systems written in COBOL and Java," says Peter. "We've reused these integrations in subsequent development projects."

Results

Year Two—Omnichannel Takes-off with My CM

Although CM now has 27 OutSystems applications in production, the most strategic of these is "My CM," which aims to provide every customer service capability that had previously required customers to visit stores or call the contact center.

"This project is all about giving our customers more choice for how they interact with CM," explains Rebecca. "And, for many of our customers, using a mobile app or a web portal is now preferable to picking up the phone or visiting a store."

CM's board set a demanding deadline for this strategic project. The IT team had just nine months to deliver the omnichannel suite of applications, including native mobile apps on iOS and Android, a customer-facing web portal, and the internal customer service app.

Given that 4.5 million customers would ultimately use My CM, performance speed and user experience were crucial design considerations.

"From an architecture perspective, we were integrating with, not replacing, systems of record," explains Peter. "Much of the project was spent building the strong foundations needed for this business-critical application suite. User experience development was mainly in the second half of the project."

CM was able to speed up development by using OutSystems UI—an extensive library of responsive visual components and screen templates that enabled the team to customize UI standards across the application suite.

Thanks to the OutSystems platform's rapid visual development capabilities, the CM development team was able to take user feedback in its stride. A UX design agency provided continuous input from a panel of customers of all ages.

Five OutSystems developers were involved in the My CM project—two from CM and three from Providit. The team delivered on time; overall development time was nine months, of which UI development with OutSystems was four months.

"Early on in our OutSystems journey, we did some development speed comparisons with Java. OutSystems was 40 percent faster," explains Peter. "If we'd not been using OutSystems, we'd have needed at least eight developers to deliver the same functionality in the time available."

The My CM app was rolled out to customers in phases, starting in early 2021. Feedback and ratings have been extremely positive—App Store 4.7 and Google Play 4.5.