Client story Vivent: Providing Better Patient Care by Moving to the Cloud
By Insight UK / 27 Jan 2019
Vivent provides home healthcare services in the Netherlands. Vivent helps about 3,500 people in the Netherlands live happier, healthier lives in their own homes or in residential care facilities. Vivent provides home healthcare services and operates five care facilities in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and surrounding communities in the country’s south-central region.
Reliably deliver needed information at the point of care.
Most of Vivent’s 1,500 employees and 700 volunteers are mobile caregivers who are in and out of patients’ homes throughout the day. They need remote access to patient health data, company procedures, and various company applications to do their jobs, but connecting employees with information was a challenge.
Vivent uses SaaS applications wherever possible and used Citrix remoteaccess software to make these and Vivent-hosted applications available to remote employees. However, the remote-access environment was rife with technical difficulties and frustrations, including complex log-ins, data security worries, and the inability to deliver rich content such as video and conference calls at the point of care. Employees sometimes used their own applications instead of those provided by the organisation, further compromising security.
It’s Richard de Fijter’s job to keep Vivent data safe, make employees productive, happy, and keep costs down. “It’s very difficult to predict computing needs, our on-premises applications and hardware were old, unreliable, and expensive to acquire, maintain, power, and cool,” he says. “We needed a secure, flexible, easy-to-use way for employees to access needed applications.”
Move everything possible to the cloud.
de Fijter wanted to move Vivent IT Services to the cloud - and let someone else manage servers. But Vivent’s challenges extended beyond servers to end-user device management, sign-on problems, and more. To guide the organisation’s journey to the cloud, de Fijter brought in Caase.com, a local technology provider that specialises in the Microsoft cloud.
de Fijter already knew that he wanted to partner with Microsoft. “There’s only one cloud for us, and that’s Microsoft,” he says. “Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud may be viable options in the US but not in Europe, because EU privacy rules, especially GDPR, are brutal, and we felt that Azure had stronger and more flexible security.”
Caase.com recommended a wide-ranging suite of services to solve Vivent’s productivity, security, and computer management problems. It proposed deploying Microsoft Office 365 to provide employees with access anytime, anywhere, and on any device to oft-used Office applications. The solution also included moving onpremises applications into Microsoft Azure to eliminate the cost and hassle of maintaining hardware. In addition, Caase.com recommended taking advantage of Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security for Single Sign-On (SSO) to Office 365 and Azure-based and third-party SaaS applications and also to provide advanced security features for mobile workers.
The Insight Digital Workspace™.
Caase.com went further and used these cloud services to create a portal that serves as a single, central, digital headquarters where employees can go to perform all their work. The Insight Digital Workspace™, based on Microsoft SharePoint Online, is divided into three panels: one for company news, blog, video and training materials; another for departmental (or role-based) news and applications; and a third for personal news, applications, and relevant documents. Rather than the fragmented user experience they had before, Vivent employees can reach everything they need, with SSO provided by Azure Active Directory Premium, a component of Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security.
The Insight Digital Workspace™ also includes a powerful search capability that surfaces documents, internal websites, videos, documentation, email messages, and everything else related to a desired topic that an employee is authorised to view. They can find what they need on their laptop, in an Azure-hosted application, in SharePoint Online or Microsoft OneDrive for Business (parts of Office 365), or in a SaaS application. At the same time, Vivent upgraded employee devices to the Windows 10 operating system to provide maximum device performance and security.
