Chief Digital Health Officer of global fertility services provider Virtus Health.

Most companies that provide a service or product, are going through some type of digital transformation. My advice to any business embarking on digital transformation, is to start by focusing on the purpose of the business.

For a fertility business like Virtus Health, our purpose is to help people become parents and our digital transformation program, Precision Fertility™, has been designed to help people achieve this goal.

At the heart of every digital transformation, is the foundation phase: building the business process map, where each individual process is mapped out in the organisation.

At Virtus Health, our fertility clinics are established in five different countries: Australia, Singapore, Denmark, UK and Ireland, involving nine different legal jurisdictions, multiple languages and government requirements. We tackled these differences upfront in the architecture of Precision Fertility™, by mapping out all processes that impact patients, our workforce and partners / suppliers.

Most global, multi-process organisations don’t have streamlined processes across their entire business, there are differences. Precision Fertility™ aims to enhance every step of the fertility journey, from collecting patient information, the GP referral, the initial patient assessment, fertility treatment and post-treatment. Process mapping is the first stage for an optimisation service.

In process mapping, it’s important to ask: What’s the purpose of this process? As everything in a process chain must have a purpose. This basic research uncovers the core processes, which helped us map out the future state which is Precision Fertility™.

Unfortunately, many businesses confuse digital transformation with IT upgrades. Transforming from one IT system to another is not digital transformation, nor is transforming from a paper-based system to a digital one. A digital transformation project will only bring efficiencies if processes are optimised.

The only way to achieve efficiencies is to join the integrity of the data, with optimised processes through a digital transformation program; this will enable better outcomes.

"A digital transformation project will only bring efficiencies if processes are optimised"

Firstly, we needed to understand that every patient is different. We also considered the workforce and suppliers who help deliver fertility care, and recognised these stakeholders are part of the journey too. This is the foundation principal; to design digital transformation strategies to cater for different types of needs. Data also plays a huge role in augmenting and progressively improving the delivery of care.

Data in any business is important to electronically capture. But it’s essential to collect quality data.

When you have more data to analyse, the more value it provides: this is the key objective for Precision Fertility™.

It’s all about bringing data analytics into daily workflows; when you start seeing trends emerging, that’s when decisions can be changed and that’s when you really make an impact.

Precision Fertility™ aims to show data trends visually, on an easy-to-use dashboard, with tables and graphs, to help clinicians use this information for clinical decision making.

The analysis can then be coupled with artificial intelligence (AI), to provide the clinician or scientist with very quick calculations and decision support systems. A visual representation of a possible pathway and likelihood of success for each individual patient, based on the data available.

With AI, the volume of data sets is also important, the more data sets, the better the machine learning.

The data is not based on just one scientist’s experience, it’s analysing the treatment pathways of hundreds of thousands of previous fertility cases, in a time frame that is useful for clinical use.

For fertility patients, Precision Fertility™ will augment every step of their journey with AI, to produce the most optimised pathway. Patients will be able to access their precise care record and fertility resources through the patient app. Providing analysis of their lifestyle habits, inflammatory bio markers, pathology, ultrasound results, and monitoring and tracking of their embryos.

This resource centre is one of the most critical features of Precision Fertility™ as it helps augment the whole patient journey. This precise care helps clinicians personally understand every patient. This collection of unique biological information will help specialists optimise decisions.

Precision Fertility™ is a global initiative and it’s been created to incorporate the data and legal use in five different countries, so it’s easily scalable. If we need to implement it into a new clinic we can, making growth easier.

Precision Fertility™ will go live in phases at the end of 2022, and we’ll progressively release features once we complete the initial rollout across the business with the entire scope delivered by June 2023.

It will deliver value to patients, clinicians, and staff via a highly optimised platform, with significantly improved user interface and a simplified workflow. It will create a level of harmonisation of processes across clinics.

This project is exactly the reason why I chose a career in digital health, especially when it can help people achieve their dream of starting a family.