Health care organisations are being forced to reinvent themselves, and a focus on technological innovation will be at the core of this transformation. As a result of an aging population and fewer laborers, competition between care providers has lost relevance. Cooperation, data sharing and optimisation are the new pillars of success. Marente, one of the largest providers of aged care in the Netherlands, is using Microsoft technology to lay the foundations for this new paradigm in health care. We are proud to be their guide and partner on this journey.
With roughly 2600 employees, many volunteers and four divisions, Marente provides home care, intramural care and physical rehabilitation. But care is changing. “The aging population will define the future of health care,” says Jan Keijzer, IT manager at Marente. “Care will continue to become more intensive and prolonged, with more people needing care at the same time. And there will be less people to do all this work. Already, the average level of care our clients need is rising and our homes are full, raising the bar for admission. As a result, many people that need complex care remain living at home. This obviously brings challenges for us at every level.”
Phasing our legacy, embracing change
Like most care providers in the Netherlands, Marente needs to phase out much of its IT infrastructure and applications to be able to embrace the inevitable changes. They were quick to realise that a cloud-based platform could provide the flexibility, stability and continuity they needed. We are working with them to provide this with our Rapid Circle Cloud Workplace. This is a custom solution that gives care providers a completely new ICT landscape tailored to their specific needs. In addition to replacing outdated infrastructure and applications, it can provide the following:
- Standard workplaces for healthcare personas, managed by Intune and enriched with Microsoft Teams and a selection of applications
- Security from Microsoft 365, our Security Operations Center and our Cloud Operations Center
- Managed Services, Security Services and Continuous Improvement
- Managed Continuous Adoption and Change Management
This enables organisations like Marente to:
- Liberate and democratize their data to support creative exploration and better decisions
- Provide mobile access to data, for use during the actual care process
- Build Power Platform applications to digitise paper processes
- Supporting hybrid work
- Provide the infrastructure for remote healthcare
- Integrate systems and their processes across organisations in the region
- Enable effective use of IoT devices like wearables, cameras and sensors to support self-care, faster emergency response and prevention
Beter data, beter decisions, better care
How does better data and infrastructure improve care? This may be hard to quantify, but the improvements are also hard to deny. Keijzer has a few very concrete examples: “Our care workers now have better access to information using their mobile devices. Which gives them access to crucial data no matter their location, and has made a big difference in their day to day work.”
“Thanks the implementation of Power BI, we can now access data from two separate EHR systems from a single dashboard. This frees us from the rigid data analysis environments these systems offer. Allowing management staff to run their own analyses on production data lets them plan the work better and tells them whether or not they are meeting their targets. In the future, we will use this data to predict which care a person is going to need, and for how long. This will make us more efficient, but, most of all, it will empower better decisions in planning and staffing and thus better quality of care. Also, we’ve made our accountants very happy.”
No longer having single points of failure in the IT organisation also takes the stress out of infrastructure and application maintenance. Or, as Jan puts it: “I sleep better now.”
The future of care is in the cloud
“Our organisation is simply too small to have all the expertise to maintain a complex on-premises landscape. And even if the expertise is there, it’s likely to rest with a single person, creating a single point of failure. That’s a risk we simply can’t afford. Also, our form of care is changing. With the focus shifting from intramural care to helping people live at home, we’re becoming a distributed, 24/7 business. This demands a level of continuity and security that no organisation can provide on its own. Microsoft 365 is generally a good match with those requirements. In some cases, the Microsoft platform is better at supplying the management information people need, where and when they need it. Role-based access from the Rapid Circle personas gives us a quick and secure way of distributing information. This is exactly what we need, because in our organisation, teams are responsible for their own results. Managing this responsibility demands easy and intuitive access to data. Higher up in the organisation, management has different requirements. They need timely data on finance and operations, as a basis for fast and effective decision making.”
“Rapid Circle really gets health care”
“The big differences between various forms of care are the data and communications strategies for each division,” says Keijzer. “Rapid Circle understands these differences. They understand health care, and they have a grip on the use cases that are relevant to us. They share knowledge they have accumulated in previous projects and really invest in learning more about the world of care. The interaction is fantastic and started as soon as we kicked off the project with a very inspiring session on the future of data in health care. Their openness and creativity really gave us the faith to start this journey with them. ”
In moving its IT landscape to the cloud, Marente follows a roadmap that fits the organisation and culture. Keijzer: “One unique thing about Rapid Circle, is that they can manage change to our organisational culture. There were times when we had doubts about their approach, but they really listened and let us determine the speed of the transition. This is important, because we have people at vastly different levels of digital proficiency. And not everyone is open to digital change at first. This requires an empathic, people-centered approach. Rapid Circle understands and delivers this.”
A solid infrastructure for the future of care
Self-care and remote care will be an integral part of Marente’s mission of doing more work with less people, while safeguarding and improving quality. The intense pressure care providers are feeling is also fueling regional cooperation. Instead of competing to ‘fill the beds’, the shared challenge now is to give every client the best possible care. Working together requires liberating and sharing data. That, in turn, demands flexible integrations and a solid, more agile infrastructure. With Microsoft 356 and Azure, Marente now has more freedom to innovate, explore and lead the transformation of care in their region. “Quality of care is what we need to be focusing on,” Keijzer says. “Cloud infrastructure, integration between Azure and the rest of our landscape and easy, safe access to data will have an important role in that.”
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