Cases

Stichting Beter met Elkaar & Gids

Through our collaboration with Miles Ahead Business, we have been asked to participate in ‘Stichting Beter met Elkaar’ (Better With Each Other Foundation’), in order to contribute our knowledge and expertise to the development of open-source standards and smart technological solutions for data exchange between the social and healthcare domains.

With the condition to use (existing) interoperable open source standards, the goal was to create breakthroughs for scalable new (ICT) applications in healthcare across three care domains (Social, Personal and Professional). 

The participation of Headease has led to:

  • The development and delivery of a new standard: Health Tools Interoperability (HTI). With HTI, a third-party app or program can be started anonymously from a portal.' HTI has aroused the interest of The Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, ‘Medmij’ and the ‘Koppeltaal Foundation’.

  • The development of a proof-of-concept for data exchange and self-management of data.

The results of our work are available on Github under an open-source license.

VZVZ & Koppeltaal

Since the establishment of Koppeltaal (‘Connect Language -standard-’) in 2014, Headease has been a very active member of the Koppeltaal Community. For example, we contributed to the development of Koppeltaal by documenting, developing, managing, and automating the release and testing processes of the Koppeltaal Adapters and making recommendations in the field of performance improvements.

Because of this background, VZVZ* asked Headease in 2019 to take on the role of coordinator and by doing so have a leading role in the development of Koppeltaal 2.0.
Read more about this (Dutch only)

*The Association of Healthcare Providers for Healthcare Communication (VZVZ) is an association of umbrella organizations in the Dutch healthcare sector and their patients.

Antes

The collaboration with Antes, a Dutch major provider of Mental Health Care, stems from the collaboration with Bouman GGZ and Care providers online. This collaboration is characterized by bringing together innovative ideas & technology and an iterative development process in collaboration with end users. This has resulted in a number of achievements and leading applications:

  • The first E-mental Health intervention, assessed by the ‘Trimbos institute’ as the first in the Netherlands with the quality mark: 'Online Tool'.

  • An e-health CMS, for the development and accessibility of e-health modules, lessons, plugins, and interventions.

  • The first, independent of content, client portal based on ‘Koppeltaal’. The client portal consists of various 'small' applications that work together in synergy to offer clients a seamless transition between interventions and other treatment-relevant information.

E-HEALTH CMS

With the E-CMS (E-health Content Management System), healthcare organisations can independently create e-health modules and publish them to Koppeltaal. The big advantage is that participating healthcare organisations are not tied to navigation or other functionalities. In practice this means that the modules can be accessed in any portal or platform, with insight into the results and progress of individual users (both clients and practitioners). The E-CMS is also able to send status reports. The content is accessed without portal-specific functionalities and depends on Koppeltaal for logging in. The E-CMS offers a 'Rich-text editor' with practical layout options (HTML/CSS) and basic exercises; Multiple Choice, Fill in the blanks, and Drag & Drop.

CLIENT PORTAL

Client Portal offers a centralised portal from which users have access to their treatment plan, consisting of e-health material linked via Koppeltaal and all relevant tools such as chat, agenda, and video call. What is revolutionary about this portal is that it has been developed in such a way that it is fully able to communicate via the Koppeltaal standard.

The client portal actually consists of various applications that seamlessly work together. Giving the client the impression of working in one system, while, behind the screen, the connected mental health care providers have the liberty to offer the best-suited support tools without any restrictions.

The Client Portal consists of the following technical components:

  • The user interface

  • Identification and authorization layer based on Keycloak.

  • An interoperability API (Worker), responsible for: integration with external systems such as Link Language and other APIs, keeping information in sync, delivering real-time information to the user interface.

  • Agenda.

  • Video calling & chat based on Jitsi.

COMPOSER

Composer is an important step towards result-oriented treatment and fulfills the wish to be able to combine e-Health from different providers into a single offer by means of Koppeltaal. Such combined offerings can then be made accessible in client portals. Thanks to Composer end users are now able to switch between different lessons from different providers in one go without having to navigate between different systems. For example: after completing Lesson 1 of the Sleep module of provider A, the client will automatically continue to ‘Rom 2’ of provider B.

With Composer it is possible to create a Mix & Match offer that meets the specific wishes of individual clients. This allows healthcare institutions to make optimal use of the wide range of e-health materials. As a result, clients will ultimately benefit from a personal treatment plan.