You want to keep your healthcare employees happy and productive and avoid wasting their time with clumsy, legacy digital applications. The cloud workplace is key for employers in solving this, because it makes data and functionality easy and accessible in one place.

Healthcare workers care deeply about their work. They strive to provide the best service to their clients, but they are often bogged down by faulty digital tools. As well as caring for others, they also need access to up to date information and they have duties in recording, administration and communication. If they work in self-managing teams, they may also have to juggle some planning and inventory tasks.

All of this takes place in their digital workplace, which often consists of all kinds of separate apps and data sources that they have to find their way around, often with limited digital skills and under high time pressure. Ultimately, this has a negative impact on overall job satisfaction, on you as an employer and therefore on healthcare itself. Your people and your clients deserve better. The crux is that you CAN use technology in such a way that it saves people time and makes their lives easier.

“Documents being mailed around… What a shame.”

A healthcare professional’s main goal is to deliver the highest quality of care and not waste time on irrelevant issues. A workplace that makes time-consuming tasks faster or even eliminates them for your professionals can assist with this. Hanneke Pastoor, our business Lead

for Adopt & Embrace, sees in practice on a daily basis that there is still much room for improvement in this area:

“There is an ECD, but the services and holidays are often planned in Excel. These documents are then sent by email, so that a planner has to make a schedule from multiple versions with different changes. And then have to send emails again to fix the mistakes. How frustrating. People in healthcare often complain about slow computers, how hard it is to access client information and logging into different apps. It is not clear how things work, or why. Users are not interested in the technical difference between application A and application B. They don’t get why they have to enter the same thing twice, why they have to look at two different screens or why they are asked the same thing twice. If you want to be an attractive employer and make employees happy, you have to improve.”

Why every employer needs a cloud workplace

A digital cloud workplace offers many benefits for your employees: faster applications, simpler login, better communication, less trouble and – with the right applications – less administration. For you and your IT staff, the cloud workplace means that you have the tools for innovation and effective data work. The digital workplace is the secure place where your people – and your clients – can manage their information and work smarter. And it is a workplace that grows with constant updates and upgrades, saving you from the worries about version management, migration and replacement.

A cloud workplace can be set up for a user type in no time, and then customised to an individual. It works well with Teams, so the workplace matches your work flows and can be easily reached from mobile devices. This is much better for your employees than the messy mix of apps, spreadsheets, and hard-to-read – and mobile-friendly – forms that they often still deal with.

This is the bottom line: you can’t progress with your digital transformation until you sort out the cloud workplace. Without a cloud workplace, it takes too long to create, launch and connect new apps and you can’t automate your processes effectively. You also can’t use your data flexibly enough in the healthcare process, where they have the most value. Without a cloud workplace, you will fall further and further behind in client safety and efficiency, but also in job satisfaction. You want to make processes simpler and make sure that employees have more time for care. You want to consider new ways of delivering care, such as remote consultations and other kinds of remote care. But none of that is possible with your current digital tools.

Cloud workplace applications

At Rapid Circle, we have a lot of expertise in setting up the cloud workplace, including in healthcare. Healthcare systems that are essential – such as the ECD – can be challenging to connect with modern infrastructure. Healthcare workers also have different needs from other knowledge workers, because they don’t like to work at a desk. It takes specific knowledge and experience to set up a cloud workplace in healthcare. But when it is done well, there are many opportunities.

Save on administration

After implementing the cloud workplace, many healthcare organisations quickly begin to streamline their administration. Some home care workers still travel with a folder of paper forms. They need to visit the office at the end of the day to enter everything into the ECD. Alter that, and you have mostly recovered your investment.

Remote collaboration

Another use case is, to make the following of protocols, digital. Many tasks in healthcare, such as verifying medication, need ‘another pair of eyes’. If you set this up in the digital workplace, for example with a video link, the employees involved don’t have to be in the same place. This way, you free up more colleagues, reduce travel and save time. This makes you more adaptable and efficient, especially at night when there are few colleagues on duty.

Being able to find each other better

Sometimes, as a caregiver need someone fast when there is no protocol to follow. The digital workplace can help you find out who is working and who is close by, so you don’t have to look for phone numbers or make multiple calls. Or, like Hanneke puts it:

“You want to be able to find each other.”

Better contact with clients

“That also applies to clients,” she adds. “Due to staff shortages, an employee hardly has time for coffee and a chat. You can partly solve this by also giving clients access to a kind of digital workplace. A simple tablet environment, for example, where they can contact an employee who is on standby especially for that purpose at the touch of a button.”

 That’s more than just fun. It can also have an important function in prevention and early detection of problems.

Guarantee data security and privacy

People often use WhatsApp to swap schedules and shifts, because they don’t have a better option. But consumer apps are also used for healthcare tasks. This makes sense, because when you are at a client’s location, you want the easiest way to communicate with each other. Chat apps are good for this, but they are not GDPR-compliant and they have a very high risk of data breaches and security issues. Also, this way of working makes it hard to separate work and personal life: you feel like you have to answer work messages in your spare time. Microsoft Teams, the foundation of the mobile cloud workplace, can be switched off and is therefore secure and good for your work-life balance.

“Teams will ultimately become the central location,” says Jurrit Wilhelmus, productivity specialist at Microsoft. “Collaboration, chatting, viewing data, calling and responding to calls come together there. You can use data to provide more context to tasks and calls and you enable remote consultation and care. The staff shortage in healthcare has been around for a long time. There is a growing realisation that simply adding more people is not the solution. You need technology to work better, more efficiently and independently of location. “

And that’s just the beginning….

A contemporary cloud workplace is the foundation for innovations that go beyond. A key example is building a data platform for improved chain coorperation. This can only be done if you first update your workplace. Investments you make now in workplace, infrastructure and digital skills will benefit you now and later, because you can innovate quicker and collaborate easier.

The cloud workplace and your infrastructure

The cloud workplace has an impact on your infrastructure and data centre. But you can control your own pace. You can use the shift to a digital workplace as a chance for your cloud migration, but you don’t have to do everything at once. For instance, you can run your mail server, mobile phones and laptops from the cloud, while your data centre remains on-premises for now. Some healthcare institutions choose to first provide a new workplace to facility staff. This way, 20% of people can often move to the cloud workplace already and you as an organisation can explore the possibilities.

We have acquired a lot of expertise in integrating the Microsoft cloud and Citrix VDI environments. We enhance and optimise it to work seamlessly with Teams, Viva and other collaboration tools. This reduces the management load on your IT department, makes your environment more secure and allows you to deliver innovations to your users faster in the future.

This makes you a more attractive employer not only for carers and healthcare professionals, but also for IT professionals.

In addition to this series of articles, we are organizing, together with Microsoft, the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare.”

Experts and experienced experts will tell you during this event:

• How to take the first step towards a cloud platform as a basis for healthcare innovation and regional cooperation
• How cloud technology and data will shape the future of healthcare, for example by facilitating the move from curative to preventive
• How data exchange radically improves chain care
• How a digital workplace frees healthcare providers from time-consuming manual work and makes their work more pleasant and efficient
• How a modern workplace contributes to retaining and attracting healthcare professionals
• How to break free from the limitations of your EPD and organize your care process the way it works for you
• The vision of other healthcare organizations on the future of healthcare

Register now and don’t miss it

Complete the form below and you will attend the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare” on April 18.

Other articles in this series: 

Prepare your healthcare facility for the future, even if you don’t know exactly what it looks like

You are a healthcare institution, and your goal is to help your clients live long and well. To do this, you face some big challenges, both now and in the future. Because you don’t have enough staff and there are fewer people who want to work in healthcare. Clients also require more care, live longer and stay at home more frequently and for more time. But you already know all that. The question is: what actions are we going to take?

Better chain care in the cloud

Improving collaboration with chain partners is a common goal. And working together is more than ‘being able to contact each other in emergencies’. Most institutions and healthcare regions know this well. And across the Netherlands, healthcare professionals, administrators and IT professionals are looking for ways to improve things. More and more healthcare institutions are realising that they cannot do this alone and need to share data with chain partners. Because your healthcare institution is often just one link in the chain. On a platform of freed data you can create care that is less burdensome, but more effective.

Automate and support processes, also outside the ECD

It is not feasible to digitise every care process in your ECD. Healthcare institutions that have attempted this for years now have a system that is hard to sustain and that does not work well with other systems and chain partners. Low code solutions like Microsoft Power Platform could be an answer. There are also many processes in healthcare that lack digital support, such as preventive screening of clients or asking for help from a colleague. There is much potential for smart automation in these ‘unstructured processes’.

Improve communication between your professionals

Healthcare is a fast-paced field. When the phone rings, or a client presses an emergency button, the situation may not be obvious at first. A cloud platform can integrate telephony with other communication modes and supplement the conversation in a secure way with data that matches the context. This way everyone is aware of what is happening and what the next step should be.

Data as a driving force for care innovation: ZorgSaam is building a platform for the future

What are the benefits of a data platform for better care, enhanced patient experiences and more efficient healthcare work? And how can a data platform prepare you, as a healthcare institution, for the future, even if you don’t know exactly what it will entail? ZorgSaam has the answer, because they created a robust data platform that supports cutting-edge healthcare innovations. With a data platform on Microsoft Azure, ZorgSaam can focus on data-driven decision-making, user-friendly access to information and other data applications for future-proof care, without technical obstacles.