Sooner or later, many growing organizations hit a wall with their legacy software. This was precisely the case for FYEO, the market leader in refractive surgery in the Netherlands. Their in-house developed Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, named ReVision, managed the company’s entire operational pipeline. However, it was still running on Delphi 5: a framework dating back over two decades. In close collaboration with GDK Software, FYEO successfully upgraded the application to Delphi 12, equipping the clinic with a stable, future-proof platform to sustain its rapid expansion.
FYEO is the largest clinic group in the Netherlands specialized in laser eye surgery and lens replacements. Operating with a team of roughly 350 employees across 15 locations—including three surgical clinics and twelve outpatient consultation centers—the organization boasts an impressive track record.
“Nobody in Europe has performed as many refractive procedures as FYEO,” shares ICT Manager Johan van den Akker. “Since 2020, we have experienced an enormous growth spurt, and this year we are opening our fourth surgical clinic in Rotterdam.”
To connect all these facilities and ensure seamless day-to-day operations, the organization relies heavily on ReVision. “It is essentially our core EHR, where we store all medical data regarding clients and treatments,” explains Wilco Boeije, Product Owner at FYEO.
Over the years, ReVision expanded into a comprehensive enterprise system supporting every facet of the business: from online lead generation and thorough pre-operative medical assessments to surgical logs, billing, and aftercare. Today, a minimum of 200 employees work in the system simultaneously every single day.
For decades, however, the application was maintained by a single external developer. As FYEO rapidly scaled up, this high level of dependency became a critical operational risk. Furthermore, the outdated Delphi 5 codebase introduced severe technical constraints, including the loss of support for third-party components.
“We needed a larger, specialized partner who could guarantee continuity and deep technical expertise,” says Van den Akker. “There are only a handful of parties in the Netherlands with this specific focus. GDK Software immediately stood out due to their no-nonsense culture, pragmatic mindset, and advanced tools. Additionally, their fixed-price guarantee for the upgrade trajectory gave us high financial predictability and confidence.”
Because a phased rollout was technically impossible for an upgrade of this scale, the team opted for a ‘big bang’ approach to transition ReVision directly from Delphi 5 to Delphi 12. The entire project spanned approximately nine months.
“It was a massive and intricate undertaking,” Boeije reflects. “Along the way, we discovered that certain legacy third-party components were no longer supported. We had to source and integrate completely new alternatives. In the initial testing phase, which was partly handled by a Brazilian developer from GDK, language barriers and the fact that our software is entirely in Dutch caused some friction. However, GDK resolved this swiftly by onboarding a Dutch developer. From that point on, brainstorming and implementing changes went incredibly smoothly.”
Following the go-live date, an intensive support period followed to iron out early bugs and optimize less frequently used functionalities. The final result was met with overwhelming enthusiasm from internal staff: the application feels fresher, looks modern, and runs with remarkable stability.
Johan van den Akker, ICT Manager
With the upgrade complete, FYEO and GDK Software transitioned their collaboration into a structured, long-term development rhythm. “We now work in bi-weekly sprints within a fixed monthly cadence, supported by a dedicated team of two GDK developers,” Boeije notes. “They spent time on-site to fully grasp our medical terminology and processes, mastering a steep learning curve remarkably fast. Instead of the old ‘you ask, we build’ dynamic, we can now deliver continuous functional and technical enhancements in a predictable, highly structured manner.”
One aspect where GDK Software truly exceeded expectations was their innovative deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the development lifecycle. As Van den Akker highlights: “The way GDK leverages AI to analyze millions of lines of code and log files is deeply impressive. It allows them to proactively catch bugs and identify potential failure points before they manifest. What used to take days of manual code review is filtered out by AI in seconds. This has yielded massive gains in both developer productivity and software quality.”
Data privacy remains rigorously protected throughout this process. Given the highly sensitive nature of medical data, a strict anonymization pipeline ensures that the source code under analysis is completely decoupled from actual client information.
By modernizing to Delphi 12, FYEO has established a solid, fully supported foundation for the years to come. The long-term architectural vision is explicit: systematically untangle ReVision and return it to its absolute core essence: the secure and optimized storage of medical client records.
“We are uncoupling non-core business processes one by one,” Boeije explains. “For instance, we have already migrated our commercial pipeline and lead follow-up to Salesforce, which communicates in real-time with ReVision via a live integration. This ensures that our custom software remains exclusively dedicated to our highly specific primary medical workflows.”
Van den Akker concludes: “We maintained a critical eye throughout the entire process, but looking back, this was a highly successful transformation. Thanks to GDK Software, our most critical system has been saved from obsolescence and is fully geared for the future. We look forward to continuously optimizing the application alongside them in the years to come.”
Contact
GDK Software NL
(+31) 78 750 1661GDK Software UK
(+44) 20 3355 4470