Jussi Vasama, CEO of Digital Workforce
Photo courtesy of Digital Workforce
Jussi Vasama, CEO of Helsinki-based Digital Workforce, which offers agentic AI for business automation, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss how the company leverages robotic process automation and AI to help streamline healthcare and social care workflows.
MobiHealthNews: Can you tell our readers about Digital Workforce?
Jussi Vasama: Digital Workforce is a company that has existed for a decade or so, so more than 10 years. We had an anniversary last year. We are a business automation company, and basically, what we do is we work with more than 200 large international organizations and basically drive progress transformation, knowledge work transformation through automation, a variety of different automation technologies, and so on and so forth.
What we are particularly proud of is our healthcare offering and our success with our customers in automating healthcare and social care pathways and working with clinicians, supporting them through productivity and also advancing long-term condition follow-up and patient safety, and so on and so forth.
We're based in Helsinki, the headquarters. There are roughly 200 people in our organization from the Nordics, in the UK and Ireland, and then in the U.S., and then we do have this kind of a service center in Poland as a company.
We do work with other industries as well, on top of healthcare, but I think that's a kind of a crown jewel. But we work with financial services customers like NASDAQ, for instance, and a lot of European insurance companies, manufacturing, utilities companies, and so on and so forth.
Turnover-wise, we are close to, let's say, around $40 million this year, aiming for that level and driving profitable growth globally.
MHN: What tasks does the company work to automate within healthcare?
Vasama: Multiple different things. Obviously, in the early stages when we started, we worked with RPA, the robotics process automation, and then it was very much around administrative processes, support processes and back office processes. But quite soon, over the course of the years, we started to move into automating and working with other technologies as well, such as AI.
We were building solutions for laboratory test handling and processing, and connecting those with other types of automations and so on and so forth, patient admission type of things, and so on.
I've been with the company for three years myself, and the last couple of years, we built this service offering we call the Outsmart offering, which is a business automation offering, which basically consists of multiple best-of-breed technologies that we provide for our customers. And with these types of technologies, including AI and business orchestration, we basically aim to run entire care pathway solutions for patients and clinicians.
Those are very much the type of things that we do, more in Europe, in the Nordics, and also in the UK. In the U.S., we worked a lot around revenue cycle management, which is, I mean, quite often happening in healthcare as well. There's a lot of, obviously, money, and a lot of decisions made there and so forth, so many of our U.S. customers have been concentrating on those types of things as well.
One thing worth mentioning also is that we made an acquisition last year, completed that in August, and bought a company from the UK, and their only focus has been to work with NHS, the UK healthcare customers, and we now have more than 60 customers in space, which is a really nice number to have. Out of roughly 200, 60 are our customers. And we see a lot of opportunities to work within the UK healthcare system and actually combine what we've done in the Nordics or elsewhere in the UK market, and really drive growth, and, of course, patient safety and have happy hospital workers to work with the patients.
MHN: Digital Workforce recently announced that it secured a $1.4 million deal with a U.S. academic health system. Can you tell me which health system it is?
Vasama: Officially, I can't, unfortunately, because we can't do press with their company name or with their brand or logo. It's a very, very big one, in the top five in the East Coast, rather up north, but maybe that's enough said. But they have more than 80,000 employees, and they are an academic institution as well. So, definitely one of the leading hospitals in the whole of the U.S., but also an internationally very well recognized hospital system. So, absolutely a lighthouse customer for us.
MHN: What are you doing with them? What was the deal?
Vasama: So, the deal is very much around the Outsmart kind of automation, offering what we have. So, we have basically taken over the customers, or we are taking over the customers on automation. How would I say ... solution stack and start to run that for the customers as a service. That's the initial stage, and obviously, when we complete that in the next couple of months, then we will try to get into really working and developing the customers' kind of ... how would I say ... processes and practices, and hope to get into pathway-type of work with them going forward as well.
They do have some of their own development staff as well, and we already collaborate with them. We have worked with them in the past on the professional services side, but now what's remarkable is that basically, we have a very nice lock-in with the customer from the operations perspective.
MHN: Are you looking to expand more in the U.S.? Are you looking for other partners that you could touch base with?
Vasama: We are. We have, let's say, a handful of U.S. customers already in healthcare. For instance, in North Carolina, on the East Coast and also in Georgia.
