Medicover’s Scaling Strategy: Growth, Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction

Medicover CEO John Stubbington reflects on 15 years of transformation, overseeing the company’s growth into a 47,000 headcount healthcare powerhouse. He shares the strategy behind scaling, efficiency, and customer satisfaction in Poland, Germany, Romania, India and beyond.
Interview By Morten Lindholm

WBJ: So, congratulations on your recent promotion. You’ve been with the company for 15 years, as I understand. Tell us a little bit about your involvement with Medicover and its growth.

John Stubbington: From my perspective, life in Poland and doing business here has been great. I moved here in 2010 after spending 17 years with Bupa, the health insurance company that now owns LUX MED. I worked for about nine years in their UK operations and another nine years in international roles, working across various countries in healthcare and healthcare provision.

At the time, I was ready for a career change. Since I had never worked in Poland before, joining Medicover felt like the perfect new adventure—one that continues to this day. That's how it all started.

I came to look after our insurance company. Back then, I had only one employee -it was just the two of us. Today, I find myself in a situation where we have almost 50,000 employees around the world. It’s been quite a journey going from managing one to 50,000.

When I first came here, I loved it right from the start. I liked the country, and I felt comfortable. Even now, when the plane lands and I get off, I feel that Poland is my home.

I found the city vibrant and modern, and it was very easy to get around. We had just built our Medicover hospital, which was really impressive—at the time, it was the most modern facility and the largest private investment in healthcare in Central and Eastern Europe since the war.

My former boss, who had been the CEO for 25 years and in the business for 30, continued to give me more responsibility. I was already a fairly experienced operator, so first I took on Poland, then Romania, and later other areas. Eventually, I was running one of the divisions.

When we first started, we were relatively small. My side of the business was worth around €100 million. Today, we’re at approximately €2.4–2.5 billion. As you can see, there’s been extreme growth. The company has been around for 30 years, but the joke I always shared with my former boss was: we may have existed for 30 years, but I’ve been around for 90% of the growth. Most of it has happened over the last 15 years.

Since our flotation in 2017—over the last eight years—we’ve expanded significantly. Take 2022 as an example: the growth that year alone clearly illustrates the scale of our progress.

We’ve added roughly 700,000 square meters of care space. Altogether, we’re now approaching a million square meters. That gives you a sense of just how much expansion has happened in recent years, both in Poland and beyond.

I never really describe my job as just being Chief Executive or Chief Operating Officer. It feels more like running multiple businesses at once: an internet company, a construction company, a legal firm, a boutique M&A practice, clinics, sports and fitness centers, facilities, eye care services, vitamin supplements, and well-being services. There’s never a dull moment.

Over the last 30 years, Medicover has enjoyed dynamic growth. What are the three most critical strategic priorities you see for the next decade to sustain and accelerate that momentum?

First and foremost, you need scale in healthcare. That’s why our number one strategic priority remains growth. The larger we become, the more we can specialise, allocate resources effectively, and provide services in a more targeted and efficient way.

The second priority for us is efficiency - an absolute necessity in today’s healthcare landscape. Across the industry, we’re all facing the same challenges. Patients want more services. We now offer far more services than we did 15 or 30 years ago. We have advanced machines that have been developed—very expensive ones—and they all need to be paid for. At the same time, people’s definition of healthcare is also expanding: it’s not just about treatment anymore, it’s about well-being, prevention, lifestyle.

There are many ways to drive efficiency. One is by empowering customers - giving them more information to manage parts of their care independently. Another is using modern tools to create more time for doctors and nurses, so when they’re with patients, they’re doing value-added work, not mundane administrative work. We’ve all seen doctors typing with one finger, slowly inputting information into a computer-that’s not an efficient use of their expertise.

The third element is satisfaction. None of what we do matters unless we achieve high levels of satisfaction—not only from our customers, but also from our people, our doctors, and everyone involved. We track this very closely. We run around 600,000 surveys a year, gathering feedback. Some of the responses are encouraging, others are more challenging—but it’s the critical feedback that helps us improve. We analyse what’s recurring, where things fall short, and how we can adjust. These insights, in turn, drive more efficiency.

These three principles—growth, efficiency, and satisfaction—have guided us for the past 30 years, and they will continue to shape our strategy going forward. As we expand, we must build efficiency. And as we become more efficient, we must ensure people remain satisfied, engaged, and supported.

So can you elaborate a little bit on the Poland’s growth what you still believe is possible?

If you look at what we do, we’re very diverse - but there are still many areas where we don’t have a major or critical presence. In some specialties, we’re simply not there yet.

Even within some of the areas we are present - take dental, for example - we’re the largest dental provider in Poland, but we’ve only consolidated about 5% of the market. That means 95% of the market is still made up of individuals: small practices, often one-to-four-chair operations. It’s a highly fragmented space. There are many similar pockets across the Polish healthcare system where we still have room to expand.

Will we achieve this through the acquisition of local operators or by building? The answer is both - we always do both. We build from scratch, and we acquire. That’s why I sometimes say I’m a builder - because I often find myself spending a lot of time on building sites when we’re working on Greenfield projects. At the same time, we also pursue acquisitions, depending on the segment. With all the new real estate developments happening, there are always opportunities to expand.

In terms of segments, we’ll continue growing in gym and fitness space. There are no large gym chains left to acquire, but there are smaller operations we would consider. Hospitals are another key area. The market is shifting from being focused mainly on primary care and outpatient specialists to more coverage for inpatient care as well. To support that, we will need more hospitals. Currently in Poland, we have 11, but we plan to add to that network either through acquisitions or new builds—we have strong experience with both.

However, we don’t currently do much governmental work. While we’re one of the top providers in the country, most of our competitors operate largely on behalf of the government. They receive government funds and deploy them within the system. In our case, government-funded work is a relatively small share of our operations. The vast majority of what we do is private pay, where people pay us directly, outside of the public health fund, for an alternative level of service.

Isn’t it difficult to compete in the area of benefit programs?

It’s always difficult to compete. When we talk about competition we say: the bigger you get, the better you get, the tougher the competition will be. As you grow, you get noticed.

When we were a smaller company, our mentality and culture reflected the reality that there would always be somebody bigger than us, somebody with more resources, somebody with an advantage we didn’t have. At that point, you face a choice: you can either feel sorry for yourself or you can ask yourself, “What does the customer want? What can we deliver that will make the customer choose us over the big players?”

So far, we’ve managed to create those solutions. More importantly, we’ve managed to retain our customers, and that’s been a key driver of our growth. We don’t just want to provide a service—we want to keep building lasting relationships with customers so they continue choosing us.