It is the people around great technology who make the “magic” happen says Jon Pickering – a belief that’s shaped his company’s rebranding. By Jennifer Trueland
Jon Pickering admits he can be an emotional guy – when he completed the London Marathon last year, for example, just squeaking in under his four-hour target, he shed a few tears.
The race was hard work, he confesses, but the sense of achievement was fantastic: he completed the race in memory of his late father and raised over £6,000 for dementia research in the process.
He felt a similar mix of emotions last month (March) when he introduced the new branding for IMMJ Systems at a VIP event for colleagues. The rebrand involved developing a whole new ethos for the company, whose MediViewer product is a leading player in electronic document management systems (EDMS) for the NHS – and also, unexpectedly, a new name.
“I care about the people I’m working with, and I care about the industry,” says Pickering. “And the rebrand meant so much to me that I was quite nervous in the morning when I got up. But halfway through the event, they played an animation that’s part of the brand launch, and everybody applauded. And I was like ‘wow, we’ve really done it’. People were coming up to me afterwards and saying it had absolutely nailed who we are and what we do, and why we exist. I’d been so apprehensive and excited that morning, but then I was bursting with pride.”
Pickering, who was appointed CEO in December 2022, has a long track record in technology, particularly in healthcare. He was co-founder of Block, an IT infrastructure solutions and services company, and before that was IT consultant for a large London acute NHS trust. But for him, although the tech is important, the people are even more so – hence the rebrand.
More than a tech solution
“When I did my research before taking this job, a lot of people said to me that they’d got a really good product in MediViewer, but that the people were even better,” says Pickering. “That ticked a lot of boxes for me. And our people are amazing. It’s a business that has a lot of passion for what it does. Everyone cares about the NHS – they’ve all worked in it – and that’s really one of our foundations.”
EDMS is at the heart of digital transformation – but it’s about far more than just a technology solution and leading clients through change, he stresses. For him, implementation is where the company shines. “Our technology is great, but the real magic happens with the people around it,” he says. “I wanted that to be felt through our messaging, through our positioning in the market. So we started to build a new identity, talking to our staff, and getting feedback from customers, who are our greatest ambassadors. Our customers told us that we had a great technology product, but that our people were amazing, and that’s what we’re trying to reflect now.”
EDMS supports the digitisation of patients’ physical medical records, enabling hospitals to scan, index, and archive, with ease. All documents are brought together in one searchable place allowing clinicians to use the information at the point of care. By giving a fuller picture, it can reduce duplication and error, improve the entire patient experience, and importantly, transform outcomes. It can also release huge swathes of valuable hospital space in terms of medical records libraries that can be repurposed as clinical areas.
But it isn’t necessarily an easy enterprise. “Moving from paper to digital involves changing the way you work as a clinician because you’ve got instantaneous access to a complete picture of the medical record, and that’s really powerful,” he says. “But it requires a lot of training, and a lot of work, and that’s where the implementation comes in. The NHS isn’t advancing as quickly as it should and there are vastly different levels of digital maturity. I feel we have a duty of care as a supplier to help trusts on that journey, whatever their starting point.”
The original plan for the rebrand hadn’t been to change the company name, he says, but the feedback was very clear. “Customers told us they didn’t know how to pronounce our former name,” he says ruefully. “One of the things that came out was that we really needed some consistency.
“The new name is Mizaic, a play on words that reflects rich mosaic of information available via MediViewer. “We create clarity out of complexity so that clinicians can improve patient experience and outcomes,” he says.
A clear picture with Mizaic
“The strapline around the brand is that the picture is clear with Mizaic. We take all this unstructured, disjointed information and pull it together into a rich mosaic that we can make sense of – so the name now means something, because that’s what we do.”
Pickering believes that the time is right for the company to rebrand and refocus as it looks to growing its market share in health services across the UK. “It’s been around for nearly eight years, so it is just coming out of the start-up phase, so there’s an opportunity for me to do here what I did with my previous company and really scale it up,” he says.
“We’ve created this new brand, this new purpose. We’ve shaped our values and principles and most importantly, we’ve got a personality defined within the brand too. We’ve got the best product in the market and the best team to do this. We feel we can really make a step change in the NHS, for patients, and that’s what we’re here to do.”
Contact Mizaic:
Website: www.mizaic.com
LinkedIn: Mizaic
Twitter: @mizaic_