Up to one-third of Italian healthcare providers operate in the private sector, and approximately 80% of those private services are paid for directly by patients, rather than through insurance. For many ordinary people, that puts private healthcare options out of reach, which is why Centro Medico Santagostino creates efficiencies in private health that drive down the costs of treatment for the patients who need it most.

“Price is a key issue,” says Luca Foresti, CEO at Centro Medico Santagostino. “We do our best to make quality services affordable for normal families, by grouping large numbers of customers to ensure that investments are as efficient as possible. That means we aim to have full waiting rooms from 8 a.m. in the morning until 9 p.m. at night, by organising timetables for doctors exceptionally well and matching them to patients.”

Using electronic communications throughout the patient journey, Centro Medico Santagostino helps over 240,000 patients book appointments, check in, make payments, and receive documents at maximum speed and minimum cost. It has proved a winning formula that has helped the company expand at speed.

Founded in 2009, today Centro Medico Santagostino operates from 14 locations in Milan and Bologna. “We grow an average of 50% every year, and double in size around every 18 months,” says Luca. “That means everything we do has to be scalable, and it’s one of the core reasons why we chose to build our system on Google products.”

Scaling with security and stability

Scaling communications solutions to match rapid growth can lead to unnecessary costs. For Centro Medico Santagostino, cost efficiencies made in communications and organisation are central to the company’s business model, connecting 140 employees with 700 medical professionals across 14 locations.

Working with physical communications servers meant estimating future expansion, over-provisioning hardware, and struggling to respond to new developments with the necessary speed. In addition, the company needed to address mobility concerns and email reliability issues. “We had problems with our email going down,” says Luca. “It didn’t happen every week, but it was a notable, visible problem for people. At the same time, we wanted to make things more mobile without developing additional software. We decided that with good web-based software, that mobility would be baked in.”

Moving into the cloud

Scalable services on Google Workspace have been instrumental in assisting Centro Medico Santagostino’s annual growth rate of 50%. “We have 850 Google Workspace accounts open at present,” says Luca, “but it’s not about what we have now, it’s about what we will have in the future. All of our doctors use Chromebooks already, as do many of our customer care specialists, and we are already almost entirely web-based.”

Centro Medico Santagostino already has nine VMs running Google Cloud Platform also handling some special diagnostic imaging applications. Now, Luca and his team are looking to leverage Google Cloud Platform with Injenia to create further scalable solutions, embracing Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Machine Learning services, and the potential of IoT for care services in the home. “We mainly use Google Cloud APIs to integrate into our processes,” says Luca. “Local companies help us with development and Google stands behind our collaborations, so we can be more secure that things are stable and trust the foundations we build on.”

“I started using Gmail in 2005,” recalls Luca. “I knew that it would develop and bring in new things, and that, if I was on the inside, I could take advantage of that. I don't know what Google will do tomorrow, but I know it will be something even stronger, and we will be riding on that wave.”