Better communication with digital platform
A digital information platform at the Koraal Group care institution ensures better communication between care providers and teachers.
What’s the problem?
The Dutch care system is largely divided up into specialisations and not designed so as to ensure that the focus is on the citizen. The Koraal Group – which operates in the provinces of Noord-Brabant and Limburg in the field of special education, youth care, care for the disabled, and access to work – also has to deal with the problem of these “partitions”. Children living temporarily in the group’s complexes are surrounded by all kinds of different parties, not just here but also at home: their parents but also such parties as their GP, the GGZ mental health organisation, the hospital, the school, and others providing treatment. All of these work with their own systems, rules, and information, meaning that timely communication of what is sometimes important information can be difficult.
So what’s the solution?
A first step in breaking down these partitions has been to develop an information platform to remove the information gap within the Koraal Group between care and education in acute situations. Working with PwC, the Koraal Group has developed a prototype for the platform.
In providing that assistance, PwC works according to the “agile” or “lean” principle that is familiar from the world of start-ups. This principle is based on innovation in the form of small stages, with assumptions being validated at each stage and feedback from the end-user being incorporated. The advantage of the agile approach is that it prevents gigantic, money-wasting failures: at some point of the process you’ve already found out whether something works or not. This approach is a kind of co-creation: PwC sets up a team within which technical knowhow is combined with practical knowledge of the sector and the client does the same.
And what’s the result?
The platform makes it possible, for example, for a child’s teacher to be informed in good time of an incident that took place in the residential group earlier the same morning. The teacher can then understand why the child is troubled. The employee at the residential group can access the platform and note what has happened. The teacher can then quickly take note of it.
The platform also makes the information available for reporting in the electronic client file and the pupil tracking system. With this information platform, virtual teams are created and the focus is placed on the child.
