A centralised marketplace for welfare services

A centralised marketplace for welfare services

Mehiläinen wanted to bring all services offered by the Group and its partners together in one purchase channel. Digia implemented a service shop for Mehiläinen, making it easy for customers to find all the services they need.

The Mehiläinen Group offers a variety of medical, dentist, occupational health, nursing and research services. The company has a national network of more than one hundred offices and employs approximately 9,000 health care and social welfare professionals.

Mehiläinen has a lot of customers and a whole host of corporate partners and wanted to bring the two together. In order to realise its idea, the Group needed a platform through which it could make a wider selection of services available to its customers.

At the same time, Mehiläinen wanted to broaden the perception of occupational well-being and health: they involve many things in addition to physician’s appointments, such as preventive services and recreational activities.

All services in one place

Digia implemented a service shop for Mehiläinen, bringing high-quality health and welfare services offered by Mehiläinen and other service providers together in one place. The goal was to create a centralised marketplace for a variety of health and welfare services offered by third parties under the Mehiläinen brand.

The Group wanted to give its service providers the opportunity to list their services in one place, under the umbrella of a known and trusted brand, gaining more visibility than would be possible with the companies’ own resources. Correspondingly, it would be easier for Mehiläinen’s customers to find the services they were looking for if everything was available in one, centralised service shop.

For Mehiläinen, the service shop would provide the opportunity to use partners to tap into a major market in which the Group itself did not operate.

The goal was to create a centralised marketplace for health and welfare services under the Mehiläinen brand.

Old lessons put to effective use

For the project, Digia cooperated with usability and user interface firm Idean, which designed the service’s concept, layout and user interface. Digia was responsible for the technical implementation. The service was implemented as a customised solution, as no-one had done anything quite like it before. An existing project template used for several other projects in the past could be used, however, which made the work considerably quicker.

The project was completed faster than expected, and the service was ready in just six weeks.

”Working with such competent professionals was easy. A sensible division of roles and open interaction were vital for a successful outcome: I had a clear picture of what we needed, and Digia’s experts had a vision on how it should be implemented. The implementation was scheduled for the summer holiday period, and the project was completed efficiently despite the challenging season. I particularly appreciate the way in which it was possible to resolve technically difficult questions in a spirit of agreement and harmony. The dialogue and development are ongoing”, says E-business Product Manager Toni Peltovako of Mehiläinen.

“Our colleagues at Digia were developing another application with the same technology choices at the same time. We learned from the experiences of the other team and were consequently able to avoid certain mistakes. It is also worth noting that we put special effort into search engine visibility since the service is a shop and the services have to be easy to find. SEO tends to be a bit neglected in single page applications”, says Lead Developer Ville Ristimäki.

The service was launched in the autumn of 2015 as part of a broader update of the user experience offered by Mehiläinen. Since release, the service has been developed further on the basis of user feedback.