The Dutch healthcare landscape is undergoing significant changes. With the introduction of the Integrated Care Agreement, concrete steps are being taken towards a transition that aims to prevent a healthcare crisis in the coming years. The aging population - and the consequent increasing demand for care - combined with a decreasing workforce, calls for a fundamental change in the organization of the healthcare landscape.
The principle of "Longer healthy at home" requires good coordination of the increasing amount of care that can be provided to patients at home. While competition and free market mechanisms have driven healthcare in recent years, it is now clear that the key to good coordination lies primarily in effective (regional) cooperation between healthcare providers.
Rivas has traditionally been an organization that united hospital care, long-term care, and neighborhood care under one management. Care coordination and the organization of home care had already been concentrated in the Rivas care center for some time. Due to the multitude of different tasks, each requiring its own systems, the working environment was experienced by the employees of this care center as confusing and cumbersome.
This design project started as an exploration of how to improve this working environment. The starting point was the idea that the optimal support should be sought from the processes and functions within the care center.
With the changes in national policy, the emphasis shifted to regional and national cooperation with other organizations, where the care center's various functions collaborate with different partners. It was therefore no longer logical to work on the design of one integrated workplace. There was a greater need for a guideline that would help in setting up the functionality around the partnerships.
Based on the process analysis of both the internal processes and the newly formed partnerships, a reference model has been drawn up that connects the layers of organizational policy (goals, desired outcomes, organization), process, and application functionality and provides insight into the relationship between them.
This reference architecture model is the most important result of the design project.