City of Helsinki
More customer-facing time for home healthcare
CGI CommunityCare360 WorkforceCenter is an easy-to-use, mobile workforce management solution for home care professionals. WorkforceCenter enables time management and frees up time for the essential: serving the customer. For Finland's largest home care unit, located in Helsinki, WorkforceCenter provides assistance in work planning and monitoring, bringing transparency to the work process.
The challenge
The City of Helsinki has approximately 10,000 home care customers a year and makes a total of two and a half million annual home visits. Most home care customers are senior citizens.
Helsinki accounts for around a tenth of all home care services provided in Finland. According to forecasts, the coming decades will see major growth in the number of over 65-year-olds as a share of the Finnish population.
Work and resource planning play a key role in the correct allocation of personnel. From the customer's viewpoint, it is essential that the agreed level of service is honored.
Our solution
The needs and requirements set for the features of mobile solution were taken into account right at the bidding phase. The key aim was to make work more transparent, both with regard to the customer and within the service organization itself. In addition, supervisors needed up-to-date information on the flow of customer work and the number of hours spent in customers' homes. From the start of their partnership, CGI and the City of Helsinki assigned project teams to develop the WorkforceCenter to meet the requirements of Helsinki's home care services.
WorkforceCenter was introduced for home care in several stages during 2012 and 2013. All users of the mobile services were given a training session and additional training was provided as new features were introduced. The latest version upgrades were performed in January 2014.
Success story
Calculations by the City of Helsinki home care services indicate that the system will pay itself back, according to both productivity and health-economy indicators.
These indicators suggest that the number of hours spent by care personnel with customers ─ direct working hours ─ has increased since the introduction of WorkforceCenter. The inclusion of a mobile reporting tool reduces the time spent entering information by half an hour or more per day. Practically all information on customer work can be entered while onsite, reducing the amount of office-based work. As part of the system functionality, reporting makes planning easier, enables efficient and fairly allocated home visits, and provides supervisors with up-to-date information on the work and work practices required in their own service areas.
Home care needs further development from the wider, social perspective; there is a need to head off the migration into institutional care, while maintaining high service quality despite a shrinking workforce. In other words, a wide range of solutions is needed based on information technology.
Why CGI?
CGI previously provided the City of Helsinki with a patient care system. Helsinki arranged a competitive bidding process for the mobile system and CGI was the winner.
CGI and Helsinki engaged in close collaboration from the start of the project. A well-functioning steering group ensured smooth progress, while enabling a fast reaction to incidents.
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