Providing affordable and accessible health screenings and education to communities across Colorado is key to 9Health’s mission, and the main source of its revenue. Although it traditionally provided these services at community health fairs across Colorado, the company sought to become a year-round service provider and developed a strategic plan to advance this new vision. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, 9Health accelerated the plan to respond to urgent needs for vital health services.
Responding to pandemic impacts and reinventing for the future
As COVID-19 began to spread across the U.S., the business impacts for 9Health became evident. Simultaneously, the organization recognized the need to reinvent ways to provide services beyond its traditional in-person community health fairs, such as by making health screenings available in homes.
Responding to the pandemic, rebounding with new offerings, and reinventing its business model for the future were key to 9Health’s ongoing relevance, mission and revenue generation. As a result, its leadership accelerated their strategic plan and quickly established four priorities for the organization:
- Continue to promote 9Health and find ways to remain relevant and mission-oriented
- Execute new services quickly, efficiently and with an eye toward scalability
- Leverage funding relationships and partners
- Flex the organization’s entrepreneurial capabilities to adapt to the changing health and prevention landscape
Increasing business agility to meet changing demands
Prior to the pandemic, CGI had been working with 9Health to implement agile processes and frameworks across the organization. While many technology solutions already were in place at the outset of the pandemic, additional strategic change management tools were needed to enable the company’s rapid shift to new product lines required to meet changing demands.
As COVID-19 impacts evolved, CGI pivoted to 9Health’s new priorities, focusing on process modernization, agile development and agile project management.
9Health’s ability to adapt to change while enabling new processes were vital to its successful product evolution and delivery. With CGI’s help, the organization quickly began offering new programs to make health screenings and education accessible to Coloradans in their homes. With these advances, 9Health can now reach rural and underserved areas in ways it never could before.
CGI's extraordinarily talented staff helped us unlock insights from years of 9Health screening data to inform our service offerings and preventive health journeys. Their work also showed us that our ROI, or savings generated as a non-profit in service to Coloradans, exceeds $1.9 billion annually. With CGI’s help, our new practices and technologies are helping tens of thousands of Coloradans to ‘own their health.’
Gary Drews, Chief Executive Officer, 9Health
New services, new reach, new revenues
Through new agile methods and advanced technology solutions, 9Health began rolling out new products and services within the communities it serves. At the same time, it began its journey to becoming a year-round prevention services provider to Coloradans.
With the additional products and services enabled by CGI, 9Health has opened new customer channels by appealing to new demographics. Its ability to innovate and launch these new offerings and channels quickly is a direct result of the agile methodologies delivered by CGI.
Additionally, 9Health has increased Coloradans’ access to vital health services by:
- Launching at-home blood screenings for cholesterol, A1c and FIT testing
- Modifying its online registration system to allow any Coloradan to get 9Health fair screenings, including new COVID-19 antibody testing
- Launching “9Health Neighbors,” which leverages volunteers to answer COVID-19 and other health-related questions
By collaborating with CGI, 9Health is using its newfound business agility and technology improvement to enable its new business model. Through this model, the organization not only is navigating through the pandemic, but also is positioned better for future growth.
With CGI, we have been able to deliver more technology innovation in the last 6 months than we delivered in the previous 6 years. CGI has been more than flexible in finding ways to stay within our technology budget and has implemented just the right amount of process and overhead to ensure the team stays on track with both CGI and 9Health objectives.
Adele Work, VP of Operations, 9Health