In the Swiss medical landscape, diagnoses and treatments are coded to assign Diagnostic Related Groups (DRGs) to patients. This, along with the total hospitalization duration, forms the basis for comprehensive case billing. Recognizing the critical nature of this coding process, Swisscoding saarl aimed to centralize medical coding resources and skills across hospitals and clinics in Switzerland, covering all specialties and scales—delivering to each client, the benefits of such a pool of experience & expertise.

I was approached to build & drive the core system that would get this undertaking on the road.

The CEO’s Challenge.

Despite being a first-mover, Swisscoding faced a bevy of early challenges—including the absence of SOPs for collaboration, non-existent data pipelines, and skepticism about an external vendor. The priority was to be highly tech enabled, yet to start small and operate with a lean tech-stack from day one.

The user-base ranged in age and tech-savviness, and consisted of global collaborators. Familiarity with medical coding and the density of such data was not an issue for most users, but usability, simplicity and efficiency of the system was. Data had to reside within Switzerland due to privacy concerns and bureaucratic red-tape between doctors and administrators posed additional hurdles.

The Solution.

The solution followed an iterative and evolutionary path—with a focus on internal case management and data ingestion workflows, on building trust and evangelization of clients, and progressive expansion of scope. There was a balance between the old (data-dense interfaces) & the new (simplified and lucid interfaces).

As the sole partner for a UX, design & technology solution—I designed and developed a multi-lingual, multi-modal system named Walter, initially conceived as a ‘butler’ managing case data, automating and streamlining internal workflows. A web-app deployed on Microsoft’s Azure in Switzerland, Walter redefined data ingestion and presentation, training users across roles through simplified yet data-dense interfaces.

Across 5 years of continuous improvement, besides designing and developing the system, I managed the data and maintained it, delivering a solution that not only solved for the users’ challenges but also ensured an extraordinary 99.99% uptime (merely 5 hours of downtime in 5 years).

This engine emerged as the vital core of Swisscoding operations, and also became the preferred workflow for its clients — essentially becoming the OS for Swisscoding ++.”

The CASC Ecosystem.

The Evolution of Walter. Two major releases – Walter 1.0 and Walter 2.0.

The Workflow.  Anatomy of the case workflow established by Walter and how it fed into the system.

Walter in action. A simple but powerful, actionable “List Mode”

Designed for Business Intelligence.

Walter was designed with powerful filtration methods and dashboard construction capabilities in mind.

The ability to create multiple actionable dashboards — easily mapped to client & process KPIs was an important objective. The ability to automate varied rules/directives and also to create customized views and worklists for delegation to users enabled Swisscoding to eliminate complex BI integrations. The ability to track case progress with high granularity within such views was an added bonus, and was greatly appreciated by the users.

Multiple Use Cases. Singular focus on Simplicity.

Walter was eventually expanded in scope to many more user roles than initially planned for. The journey was harder for some use-cases, but  transformative for and genuinely useful for each such user.  Explore use cases and some of the challenges overcome above.