Project January 23, 2026

Entering the digital future with CIO as a Service

Wysshölzli Clinic sets new standards in IT organization.

The Wysshölzli Clinic is a specialist clinic run by the Marie Sollberger Foundation in Herzogenbuchsee. It employs around 60 staff at its headquarters and outpatient clinic in Bern and specializes in treating women with eating disorders, addictions, and combinations of these. The focus is on inpatient therapies, supplemented by outpatient services that are tailored to the individual needs of each patient.

In 2020, the company faced the challenge of strengthening its IT management skills and optimizing the coordination of the external IT service provider in terms of tasks and priorities. The goal was to overcome the upcoming challenges in IT development and projects efficiently and cost-consciously. Since then, atrete has been actively supporting the clinic in IT management in an advisory capacity. The introduction of an infrastructure roadmap enabled the IT platform to be optimized in the long term and transferred to regular operation. At the same time, license and lifecycle costs were made transparent and reduced (keyword: NPO). In order to create greater transparency and a reliable financial planning basis, the IT budget for operations and projects was adjusted and structurally supplemented. Within this framework, various infrastructure projects were implemented: the migration and standardization of VoIP telephony to Microsoft Teams, the introduction of HIN Mail and Access Gateways for secure communication, the standardization of client management with simplified installation, and the improvement of login and email security.

An operating model was developed for IT organizational development that enables a clear delineation of IT responsibilities between the clinic and external service providers. On this basis, the clinic decided to set up internal user and application support to ensure fast and professional processing. A tender for computing, storage, clients, and networking has also been issued. This transformation will convert the clinic's IT system into a powerful, secure, and scalable service structure.

By switching to a new service provider, the clinic gains access to numerous infrastructure and application services (SaaS) in the Swiss healthcare sector. This, together with IT strategy planning, forms the essential basis for the targeted and rapid implementation of the planned digitization projects, alignment with Swiss healthcare standards, and the strengthening of IT security, for example through the introduction of an ISMS.

"With CIO as a Service from atrete, we have gained the strategic IT leadership and professional IT expertise that we previously lacked. This service provides us with the expertise of a proven professional with CIO experience and a comprehensive pool of resources for additional needs. The expertise provided was particularly valuable in our contract negotiations with various suppliers. This enabled us to conclude advantageous and sustainable agreements for the clinic. The external CIO has clearly focused our IT strategy, accelerated important digitization projects, and significantly strengthened the collaboration between IT and specialist departments."

BARBARA AMMANN, DIRECTOR