kameon ERP understands the requirements

Interview with Michael Weinlich. Managing Director of the company med con team.

"It's nice to be listened to"

med con team GmbH is a service provider in the field of medical and safety assistance. Founded in 2007, med con team is today represented worldwide by partner companies in 66 countries. The company has been using kameon since 2016. Founder and Managing Director Michael Weinlich is an expert in emergency medicine and a lecturer at the Frankfurt University Hospital. In an interview he talks about heart attacks in Kuala Lumpur, data entry under stress and harmonious company philosophies.

Dr. Weinlich, your company´s line of business is not very common. How does one get into such a profession?

I originally qualified as a general surgeon. Later, I was the medical director of the German Air Rescue Service and have brought back many patients from all over the world.

Together with some friends we then had the idea to establish a company that offers an all-round service for patients abroad. The basic idea is that in many corners of the world you often don’t have the medical care that we are used to here in Central Europe. Sometimes you cannot speak the language so well. You don’t know if you are being treated well and often you don’t know who is paying.

In America, South America or Asia treatment is very expensive, and if you cannot pay for it right away, you can be in a lot of trouble. We also handle employee care for companies. If employees are working abroad and there are health or safety problems, just call us and we will arrange for help on the spot. We may even have to evacuate someone as quickly as possible.

That means you send people from Germany?

Sometimes. We have partners in every country in the world. Depending on the case, we either work with our local people or we send our own team.

Could you give us an example of that?

Let's say you are in Kuala Lumpur and go to hospital with a heart attack. You will find a number on your insurance card. That will get you into our alarm center. Then we immediately record all your data with kameon. Who you are. In which hospital you are. How can you be reached? We look at what the medical problem is and make sure the costs are covered in Kuala Lumpur. And if the problem is more serious, we send a team or a private air ambulance and bring you back to Germany.

How many cases do you deal with on average?

We receive about 10 new cases per day. At the moment we have about 8,000 cases a year. And about 2 to 3 returns a week.

What role does kameon play in these processes?

The basic question was: If someone is calling that it is in a really bad way, how can employees quickly enter all the data in this stressful situation? With kameon, we can quickly get the contact information of the patient and our local partners together, every day and around the clock. The next question was, how can I reasonably account for these thousands of cases later on? We need statistics for our customers, we need invoices and of course we need a good database system.

In your opinion, what is the advantage of kameon over other solutions?

The good thing about kameon is that it is not a completely new database for which other companies spend more than a hundred thousand euros. But it is a finished system and yet a modular system that I adapt to my requirements and depending on the needs, add modules as required.

What was the biggest challenge in the collaboration?

The main problem is how can I tell a programmer what I really want. How can he understand that I need to be able to use the system under great stress, for example? As clear as the cockpit of an airplane. The interface must be designed quite differently to one in which have time for bureaucratic processes.

That is, in my opinion, always the biggest challenge. The interface to the programmer, who then implements that for me. Good communication is vital for that. Step by step, using the feedback from our staff, we work towards optimization.

And - are you satisfied so far?

The functionality is good. The stability was still a small problem at the beginning. However, we’ve always noticed failures in our 24-hour service right away, because they liked to occur at 3 in the morning. So, in that respect, we were able to correct them almost as they occurred. Meanwhile, the system is well secured by backups. We get together with the bitbase group, put together our wishes and then discuss how to implement the IT side of things.

You cannot expect an IT company to automatically know what you need, especially with such special requirements. But it's nice to be listened to and that someone understands what's needed. It is not a case of, "No, that won’t work." Rather: "How can we do it?" That's what we do for our customers. Our companies’ philosophies obviously worked well together.