Thank You

I might be under some influence of a “lamechas” song on repeat, still this something that definitely needs to written publicly...

Last week I've return to Kuwait Maternity Hospital after 2 months of the release of Sapphire Hospital Information System. When I first came to here I found pregnant woman fighting, yelling, crying in a let’s not call it a line of +50 pregnant woman to get in front of the receptionist and book an appointment with her doctor. Then she would be asking for her medical file and with a mix of luck and faith she would have to walk for 5 minutes to get a stamp and then get back to the let’s not call it a line of +50 pregnant woman to start her visit with the doctor.

At that time our critical factor of success changed from installing an application to be used and adopt by the users to reduce all the stress that these pregnant woman have before they can actually have the appointment.

In the following two weeks, onsite we had a team trying to change the world, at least the world of these ladies, of these nurses, doctors and most of all of the future babies.

You might ask, can that be done with a single application? Well actually cannot, and you know how difficult is to change the world specially if it doesn't speak your language, right?

As I was saying, in the 2 weeks following the setup of the Sapphire, we spent more hours thinking on the change process and all the change management needed in order to achieve our ultimate goal, then teaching how to use our application. Actually it took us 5 minutes to teach how to use Sapphire on their daily job, even to nurses that never used a pc before… ever.

On these scenarios you’ll always find that awkward-funny moments when the user is trying to click with the mouse on the “Press ctrl+alt+del to unlock message” in the screen or a user don’t know how to type @ character of the email address. Yes, this is indeed the scenario we’ve found in the Maternity Hospital.

During this period, we constantly kept supporting the field activity lead by ATC (our customer) excellent and committed consultants , Mohamed Magd and Tareq Al-Hemyari, to whom I wish nothing then all the best in the world. Also during this period, the Hospital Management kept implementing our suggestions, even if it wasn't an application issue, but related to the change management needed to be implemented in the field, changing the people’s mentality and behaviors.

I got back to Maternity Hospital in Kuwait last week and saw a complete and better world without pregnant woman yelling, screaming or fighting for an appointment. All the hospital environment was very good as any private hospital has to give the proper attention to their patients.

The work is not finished, still huge steps were done due to a simple application that helped to change people’s life.

About the application, we’ve roll out in the last 2 weeks a new module of Sapphire HIS in Maternity and we got a new record that I’m really proud to have it. We not just teach a nurse on how login in a computer and use Sapphire to do part of her job in less than 5 minutes but also that nurse at the end of her shift was already proactively teaching a new nurse of the next shift.

This nurse teaching nurse image that is still in my memory breaks all the past assumptions that enterprise applications are complicated, users don’t want to use them and it takes an eternity to deploy any application. For sure in the next days more histories will be told, but also in the next weeks or months lessons learned will be shared considering this huge success...

In this project many people were involved, and our Thank You for all the help and support. The job was well done also because we work with a great platform, and without the OutSystems Platform we wouldn't be able to deliver this great experience for the users through an application like Sapphire.

With all being said it’s time to say a Big Thank You for the excellence of your work Ana Pereira, Carlos Alfaro, Carlos Rocha, Daniel Aguilar, João Batista, Marco Costa, Nuno Ribeiro Batista, Nuno Teles, Pedro Oliveira, Rodrigo Castelo, Sara Ali, Sérgio Oliveira, Solange Ferreira and Vera Tiago.

Last words must be said,

for the hard work that our children give us but that makes us fit for any challenge

for their smiles and pats that give us the power to transform the world

Never forgetting all the love who holds the family when we are absent in this job that we can call the new IT “Caixeiro Viajante”.

Sometimes when you’re sixteen you think you can change the world ... and actually with the right tools and team, you can!