HOCH Health Eastern Switzerland provides medical care for the whole of Eastern Switzerland. The range of services extends from local primary care and regional specialized medicine to end-of-life care. The company was formed on January 1, 2025 from the merger of the former hospital associations of the Canton of St.Gallen. Every day, over 8,500 employees at HOCH Health Eastern Switzerland are committed to people's health.
Initial situation
The hardware support team at HOCH Health Eastern Switzerland has the challenging task of supporting more than 10,000 hardware devices at various locations throughout Eastern Switzerland.
The decentralized structure of the organization throughout Eastern Switzerland means that support teams are not available on site at all locations. In this context, it was recognized that a hardware vending machine offers considerable potential as a productivity-enhancing measure, particularly for the efficient issue and return of hardware.
HOCH Health Eastern Switzerland had already given an initial presentation of the planned use cases for the IT vending machine, but the full area of application had not yet been conclusively defined. In the end, the cora IT vending machine convinced those responsible: The device met all requirements, impressed with its high level of flexibility, its targeted focus on the needs of an IT service organization and the seamless integration of numerous standardized systems.
An exchange of experiences with other hospitals already using cora IT terminals dispelled any doubts. The consistently positive feedback convinced Hoch Health Ostschweiz to fully rely on cora.
Implementation
The first location chosen for cora was the St.Gallen Cantonal Hospital. The cora IT machine has found its home in the newly built building 07A. At a central location, which all new admissions also visit during onboarding, cora is in optimal hands.
The implementation of cora went smoothly and met expectations right from the start. Thanks to the professionally managed cora Customer Success Management process, the effort for HOCH was kept efficient and minimal. As the use cases for the deployment of cora by HOCH Health Ostschweiz had not yet been fully defined, the company benefited from customized support in the implementation of the selected use cases.
cora is used in various areas of application: IT peripherals such as keyboards, mice, power supply units, headsets and cables can be easily obtained from cora via self-service. Employees verify themselves with their company badge. The hardware purchases are always assigned to the predefined cost centers.
The introduction of the "Scan on withdrawal" function has turned out to be a real game changer: here you can set a hardware asset to be scanned when it is withdrawn from the cora. This allows assets to be clearly assigned to a person after removal, even if several assets are stored in one compartment. This allows the company to store several high-priced items in the cora.
Successes
Initial concerns as to whether cora would be used by employees at all were quickly dispelled. Since the go-live, the figures clearly show that cora is being used! On a qualitative level, too, cora has been fully accepted by employees, as shown by the measured customer satisfaction with an excellent score of 4.7 out of a possible 5 points.
The IT team is also extremely satisfied and fully supports cora. One of the main reasons for this is that cora enables IT to impressively demonstrate its innovative strength and attract positive attention.
In addition, the implementation of cora has significantly reduced interruptions in the IT team's day-to-day business. The time-consuming manual processing of every single hardware issue and return is history thanks to cora. Many of these processes are now largely handled as self-service, which gives the team considerably more capacity to carry out more demanding tasks.