Marcel Napierala is co-founder and has been CEO of Medbase AG for over 20 years, an innovative Swiss healthcare provider with around 3,200 employees and around 150 locations, known as “points of care.” In the Stettler CEO Talk, he explains the advantages of integrated healthcare and why the boundaries of the system must be broken down.
Interdisciplinary care as a success factor in outpatient medicine
Marcel Napierala, Medbase AG is one of the largest outpatient medical service providers in Switzerland. What is Medbase’s main focus?
Medbase aims to provide integrated medical care in the most innovative and agile way possible. All of our initiatives and efforts revolve around our patients. They are our focus. We want to remain an agile, young organization, actively shape the healthcare system, and strengthen primary care in the outpatient sector.
You co-founded Medbase AG in Winterthur in 2001, then worked as a physiotherapist and managing director for the first four years while studying business administration. What have been the biggest challenges since the company was founded?
The biggest challenge was and always will be to pursue our core tasks with high quality standards and to focus not only on remaining good, but on constantly improving.
And what have been the biggest highlights in the history of Medbase AG so far?
We experience highlights every day. The focus is always on the patients. When we can help a person in various ways— ly and multidisciplinarily—to improve their health and thus their quality of life, that is a highlight.
Can you give us an example?
We were able to achieve high quality and cost optimization in the care of chronically ill people with an interdisciplinary team. I am very happy about that.
Medbase gained Migros as a strategic partner in 2011. How has Medbase changed since then?
We haven’t changed much, i.e. we’ve been able to remain culturally the same. Migros has given us a lot of creative freedom. At the same time, we’ve been able to learn a great deal about organizational development and continue to do so. With Migros, we have a long-established company on board as a shareholder that doesn’t think in terms of maximizing profits. That’s a very important point and extremely helpful in many discussions.
Securing long-term care: why cooperation and good processes are crucial
Innovation in healthcare is important to Medbase – what is your vision for the future of healthcare?
Innovation does not mean revolution, but rather that we begin to bring together fragmented services and implement the goal of integrated care across the board. We need to break through the system boundaries, i.e., not only look at processes in the outpatient sector, but also consider what happens to the people we care for beyond our system boundaries. This requires digital interfaces, well-trained employees, and continuous training.
What does this “integrated care” look like in everyday life at Medbase?
First, we act as a primary care provider, i.e., we are the first point of contact. A patient comes to us for a consultation with a family doctor or internist and receives comprehensive care. Depending on the case, specialists and complementary and alternative medicine practitioners are then consulted as needed. Within the framework of “managed care,” patients can access various services in one place in an outpatient setting wherever possible.
We also work with external specialists, partners, and hospitals. Not all of our centers are set up in the same way. Some are purely medical centers, while others comprise interdisciplinary teams that care for their patients from prevention to acute medicine to rehabilitation
Rural regions in Switzerland are finding it increasingly difficult to provide medical care. What is Medbase doing in this regard?
Recruiting medical professionals is indeed more difficult in rural areas than in urban areas. I myself come from Kandersteg in the Bernese Oberland and am familiar with the situation in the region. That is why our project in Zweisimmen is particularly close to my heart. In order to ensure medical care in rural areas, we must do everything in our power to make working conditions more attractive for doctors. We can only achieve this through partnerships with municipalities, hospitals, and others—everyone must contribute.
The healthcare system is influenced by many different players. How are you networked within Switzerland and what are your goals for improving healthcare together with your network partners?
We have a very strong network, particularly with health insurers and hospitals, and we are in the process of formalizing what is in many cases rather informal cooperation. We need to optimize the interfaces and find solutions together so that processes run more smoothly and an ideal cost-benefit ratio can be ensured. This serves the interests of all parties involved – the various professional healthcare providers and the patients.
Optimizing interfaces is no easy task. How is Medbase approaching this?
In contrast to a top-down approach, we try to analyze existing processes and the patient pathway together with a number of hospitals with the aim of eliminating as many redundancies as possible, speeding up access to care, and optimizing communication between therapists. This ultimately enables us to replicate the processes. Although this is sometimes hard work involving a lot of detail, we are convinced that the effort will be worthwhile.
Values and leadership culture
Where do you see points of connection between the values of Migros founder Gottlieb Duttweiler and Medbase?
I was fascinated by Migros’ guiding principle: “Migros is the Swiss company that is passionately committed to the quality of life of its customers .” In principle, this was probably also the justification for Migros entering the healthcare business in the first place. Migros has many values that are also anchored in Medbase’s mission statement: sustainability, improving the quality of life and well-being of customers, delivering good quality, and many other similarities.
What is special about your management style?
I consider it essential not to take yourself too seriously. It is immensely important to listen very carefully to the experts and only then interpret and draw your own conclusions. Of course, you also have to be genuinely involved, put your heart and soul into it, and be genuinely interested in people. I believe that if you take this to heart, you will also lead authentically, and that is my approach to leadership.
Outlook for the next five years
Looking to the future: where do you see Medbase in five years?
Medbase will increase the number of points of care and we will have expanded our network considerably. We will have implemented more consistent patient processes to make it easier for patients to receive the right care at the right time and in the right place. We will have made great strides in digitalization and… we will still have the same culture.
How will Medbase attract medical resources in the future?
Today, over 70 percent of our employees are women. In the future, we must become even better at employing academically trained women and, increasingly, men in working models that are attractive to them. And we must be able to attract young talent to the outpatient sector by showing young people how attractive interdisciplinary work can be, how enriching it can be to exchange ideas with specialists from other disciplines, and that there are agile organizations like Medbase where the structures are not so rigid.
Personal inspiration and motivation
Which people inspire you?
I am inspired by people who are passionate about what they do and get involved. These are often entrepreneurs, but I have also seen people with disabilities very often using the concentrated power of their personality to do their work… incredibly fascinating…
Apart from work, what inspires you?
I like to move and I also like to exercise; being still is not really my thing. Anything to do with movement, whether physical or mental, inspires me.
Conclusion
For Marcel Napierala, sustainable healthcare means overcoming existing system boundaries and rethinking collaboration. Integrated care, interdisciplinary teams, and clear processes form the foundation for this. Supported by value-oriented leadership and a strong culture, Medbase shows how quality, innovation, and humanity can be sustainably combined in outpatient healthcare.
