What happens when you have two leading organisations in healthcare and ICT working together on solutions that the healthcare sector needs? You get the added value that Altide and Enovation offer together. The organisations have more than a customer-supplier relationship; they share the same vision and want to use it to advance healthcare.
The challenges facing the healthcare sector are clear. There are fewer and fewer staff, funding is under pressure, and the demand for care is actually increasing. This calls for action. Medical service centre Altide and Enovation are both taking measures and assisting the healthcare sector in their own way.
Maarten den Heijer, director of customer relations at medical service centre Altide.
ICT applications are helping to tackle the staff shortage problem. “We offer qualified healthcare professionals on standby to assist people 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Maarten den Heijer, director of customer relations at Altide. “They provide triage and can determine when a patient requires attention. We prevent GPs or nurses from having to take action, thus reducing their workload so those doctors and nurses can be where they are actually needed.”
A healthcare centre needs to have immediate access to all available patient data to make a proper assessment. “This 360-degree view of a patient is necessary and we achieve this in part by using Enovation’s solutions,” says Den Heijer. Incidentally, the healthcare centre’s broader and more extensive tasks have led Altide to replace the term ‘healthcare centre’ with ‘medical service centre’.
Enovation’s software is indispensable for a company like Altide. Altide has purposely and decisively chosen the solutions offered by Enovation. “There are two reasons for this,” explains Maarten. “With Enovation we really are a team. We don’t feel like customers; we are partners. We provide the facilities and medical service centre assistance, Enovation provides the technology. It just feels right. Our collaboration was always good, but I notice that this joint development is also improving and broadening our collaboration across various layers.”
‘We don’t feel like customers; we are partners.’
“The second reason why we work well together is a logical one: the UMO platform has been developed to such an extent that we cannot even imagine a better solution for handling alerts. The developers at Enovation have really thought about improvements that work for us.”
Monitoring centre of Altide (foto: Altide)
Let’s go back to how all this began. It has been 20 years since the two organisations combined their efforts: Altide started using Enovation’s software to process personal alarms in what were called alarm centres back then. And a success story was born. Incidentally, the companies then were our precursors, as Altide was formed from the merger of NAAST, Zorgcentrale Noord (ZCN) and Connectzorg, and the partnership emerged with Verklizan, which was acquired by Enovation.
Enovation now provides enormous added value for an organisation like Altide. The customer is the key focus, but software is acquiring an increasingly prominent role,” says Den Heijer. “The UMO platform is becoming increasingly important and dominant.”
Den Heijer is referring here to UMO cx, which is actually a completely new solution for telemonitoring by medical care centres. “We now use UMO for personal alarms, dispensing medication, medication checks and home access. We are also looking into integrating other services, such as visual care and home monitoring. Our employees are very satisfied with UMO and I expect they will be even more excited about the new version.”
As mentioned, Altide and Enovation share the same vision for the future of healthcare. Den Heijer: “People are going to be performing more and more care tasks themselves. An increasing amount of care is also delivered at home. This is a result of the staff shortage and the joint goal of keeping healthcare affordable. Altide is actively responding to this with home monitoring and remote care services.”
‘Our collaboration was always good, but this joint development is also improving and broadening our collaboration across various layers.’
The future of healthcare is 24/7 remote care. An important development is proactively predicting the demand for care based on sensors, measurement devices and available data. UMO cx enables us to leverage this.
The role of healthcare centres is therefore gaining importance. Healthcare centre tasks have long been much more wide-ranging than simply following up on alerts and phone calls. “Our partners are senior care organisations, home care, hospitals, GPs as well as customers who are simply connected directly to our medical service centre with an alarm button. But organisations in mental health care and mental disability care also see the need for personal alarms and sensor technology.”
Monitoring by Altide. (foto: Altide)
This is also becoming increasingly important for hospitals, as pressure on hospital staff and hospital bed occupancy is high. Den Heijer: “Altide offers services to monitor patients at home. But how do you organise that as a hospital? Hospitals can do two things, the first is outsource home monitoring to a party with experience in this field, such as Altide. We are currently performing home monitoring for hospitals. We do this for several chronic care pathways, such as oncology, COPD, heart failure and IBD. The second option is for hospitals or collaborating hospitals to set up their own home monitoring system, but in our view that is only possible if you have the ability to implement this on a large scale.”
“We understand that the new UMO cx provides opportunities to support home monitoring as a platform and we are also exploring these options. What’s great about Enovation is that it offers a whole range of solutions. That really adds value, also for us as a customer.”
Altide is the leading medical service centre in the Netherlands. “When the service was launched, it was actually two workstations with a computer and a phone,” says Den Heijer. “We have 65,000 customers across the Netherlands connected to personal alarms. Every day we process around 1,000 calls and 1,900 alarms; that’s almost 2 million signals every year.
“We now employ 250 people, 215 of these work in our medical service centre with a headset. A large number of these staff are nurses who triage all our calls. If done effectively, this prevents the need for on-site care in 80 per cent of calls. This is how Altide plays a significant role in keeping healthcare sustainable.”
To some, the term remote care sounds rather… distant. But in fact, remote care is care close at hand. Through digital means, the healthcare provider can reach the patient faster than scheduling a visit by a doctor or nurse. Altide’s services and Enovation’s ICT solutions play a prominent role here; a role that both organisations are keen to play.
Every day, ambulances in the Netherlands send around 10,000 messages to hospitals. There is a story behind every ambulance dispatch and every message. Each message could be a matter of life and death for the patient in the ambulance. That means the underlying ICT technology must work flawlessly. AZN has been working with Enovation in this area for years.
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