RORY BATT - Chief Digital Officer at Mediq on Unlocking innovation in healthcare

From the jungles of Borneo to brewing and now healthcare, Rory Batt has relied upon one key tool to deliver consistent success for companies globally throughout his career – technology. Here, he discusses recent efforts to leverage digital to transform the services and solutions of European giant Mediq.

Moving from brewing to healthcare is not a typical change in career.

Back in 2012 Rory Batt joined the European operations of AB InBev, the world’s largest brewery on their prestigious global management trainee program.  Fast forward to today, and he is now Chief Digital Officer of Mediq – a billion-dollar enterprise supporting healthcare professionals and patients with critical medical devices, healthcare products, services and innovative solutions.

So, how does such a stark operational and industry switch come about?

For Rory, it’s been something of a natural transition. “I’ve always had a habit of taking very large leaps into the unknown throughout my career,” he explains.

“I’ve worked in the jungles of Borneo for Raleigh International. I’ve been on the brewery shop-floor, led logistics operations, HR integrations, and commercial operations including managing director of UK’s premier craft brewery, Camden Town Brewery. But down each and every one of these corridors, technology has always remained front and centre.”

While Rory has always had an understanding and appreciation of the value that technology can bring to a business, the most significant turning point in this journey was perhaps his promotion mid-career to a team that ultimately formed the foundations for the digital transformation within AB InBev in European operation.

“At that time, AB InBev had a very traditional B2B business model,” he explains. “Our representatives went to pubs, built relationships, and took orders in person – a way of working that hadn’t really changed for 30 years.

“We initially focused on moving that manual process online, a project that marked the start of a wholesale digital transformation which ultimately culminated in AB InBev becoming one a digital leader consumer goods businesses five years later”

Surviving the industry

With a proven track record in spearheading digital transformations, Rory’s credentials and skillset for the Mediq position were clear. However, it was not just the functional aspects of the role that drew him to this latest venture, but equally the industry context and business itself.

“I was prepared to take a new risk and step into a new industry for a number of reasons,” Rory affirms.

“Firstly, the purpose of Mediq and of the healthcare industry itself. Mediq’s mission is focusing on driving the efficiencies of healthcare outcomes in Europe through its products, services, and solutions. Every day, millions of patients and healthcare professionals count on us to supply them with devices and innovative healthcare solutions. I was immediately attracted by the opportunity to directly impact this from an emotional perspective”

In addition, Rory saw similarities between the challenges facing the brewing industry with those facing the healthcare industry today.

He reveals: “I saw parallels in the healthcare industry with what I had encountered at AB InBev 10 years ago – a traditional industry that needed to take a proactive leap into the 21st century. Yes, the content is very different, but the digitalisation journey required is incredibly similar.”

Thirdly, Rory saw in Mediq, with its wide European platform both the scale & leadership team to lead that charge along with the cultural willingness to take bold steps forward.

Laying foundations

So, how exactly has Mediq progressed on its own digital transformation journey in the 15 months since Rory joined the team?

By the CDO’s own admission, much of the initial period following his appointment was spent getting the right talent in place, building out what he refers to as the organisation’s “digital muscle” to ensure it had strong foundations from which digital platforms may grow, evolve and scale across the entire group.

“Our ultimate goal is to support and enable our patients and professionals with relevant digital products, services and solutions,”

Rory states. “For this to work, we need to have digital leaders who not only understand customer pain points but can also translate that into clear requirements for technical teams to follow and drive the digitalisation of the wider business.”

Rory also looked at a shortlist of inherited projects in the immediate term, making some hard decisions while doubling down on which would both have the most significant impact, and be able to scale across the entire group.

Once these immediate priorities had been addressed, Mediq began to deliver transformative outcomes for customers in a range of verticals and capacities.

“If you look at the healthcare industry today, it’s struggling against multiple headwinds,” Rory muses. “Inflation is a huge driver of labour costs, staff shortages are common and the professionals on the front line often waste too much time on tasks that don’t improve patient outcomes. I think at Mediq, we have both the capabilities and moral purpose to support these challenges.

“For that reason, our digital strategy is largely focused on enabling seamless customer experience of our product offering whether a patient, a professional in a GP (general practitioner), care home, hospital in any of our markets, while offering services that reduce their operational burden and solutions that ultimately improve patient outcomes.

Over 100K direct patients and 50K professions are regularly ordering and interacting on Mediq’s digital platform which has a strong foundation and expanding digital services offering across multiple markets.

For example, their care home resident service enables care workers to spend more time focusing on looking after patients by simplifying and streamline stock management processes. In the Netherlands, for example, care home staff can place and have orders placed, packaged and in specific residents rooms – a simple solution, but one that makes a massive time saving difference to our customers and their teams. Or in Finland, with their AITTA service, Mediq either manages order management for the customer on the customers behalf or enables high efficiency with their self-service scan solution.

“People working in this environment are amazing individuals who care most about helping their patients or residents,” Rory affirms. “With this service, we’re helping them by reducing administrative burdens and putting their time where it is needed most, the people they care for.”

Elsewhere in the group, Mediq leverages advanced, automated prescription services and decision to help prescribers set-up and order for their patients or help patients then choose the relevant product themselves.

“If you’re a healthcare professional and you’re prescribing goods, you need to have a very simple and seamless process to go from patient onboarding to product provision that’s highly precise and efficient, making sure that the right product is provided to the right patient, at speed,” Batt affirms.

A new era

Alongside its product and service agenda, Mediq is also enhancing its solution strategy through advances such as Mediq Connect – the firm’s unique remote patient monitoring solution.

“If we look into the future of healthcare, we see this is a key area in which current healthcare challenges can be combated by relieving pressure on healthcare nurses while improving patient outcomes,” Batt explains.

“If you look across Europe, we do not have enough doctors or nurses. Therefore, by deploying remote patient monitoring, we can reduce demands on hospitals by using technology to care for patients at home, all while ensuring that professionals have all relevant data around each patient with alerts to be able to intervene when and where necessary.”

These capabilities are underpinned by Mediq’s wide-ranging medical device portfolio, integrated logistics model, relevant medical compliance accreditations, and high scale across multiple markets. Rory adds: “This, combined with our digital muscle, makes us uniquely placed to develop, test and launch innovative solutions such as Mediq connect, which we piloted with a major Finnish private hospital this year.”

For the CDO, data-led solutions such as these are at the very heart of what’s needed to enhance Mediq’s offering as it strives to provide patients and healthcare professionals with improved solutions.

“I had a great boss in the past who used to say, ‘if we only have opinions, I take mine. If we have data, let’s discuss’,” Rory states. “I try to live by that motto – if you don’t have detailed visibility of the problem you’re trying to solve, and the ability to measure success, you will likely spend a lot of money and still land very far from where you want to be.”

Alongside good quality data, Batt also highlights people and processes, a shared vision for the future of an organisation, the culture and willingness to embrace change, and an ability to maintain momentum as key ingredients of a successful digital transformation.

Indeed, it’s a complex puzzle comprising a variety of spinning plates. Yet in the eyes of Rory, each must be firmly understood, planned and delivered alongside a successful digitisation journey – such as those seen at AB InBev, and now underway at Mediq –can be realised.

“The way in which health services are provisioned has not significantly changed over the last decades, and we know that the care level has to improve and become more cost-effective,” he iterates as our conversation comes to a close.

“Technology will play a key role in helping to realise that transition. Just as we’ve seena major change in the way consumers interact online for everything from shopping to banking to getting taxis, I foresee a future in which healthcare follows and becomes much more consumer-centric, more efficient and delivers better outcomes.

“It’s likely that artificial intelligence will further accelerate this. We are 11 months into generative AI, and already we’re seeing the huge potential of it, driving huge strides forward in everything from diagnosis to treatment to more accurate and personalised healthcare.

“It will bring lots of risks and lots of benefits, and we’ll have to see how it pans out. But in the end, AI can be an incredibly powerful tool, if used well.”www.medIq.com