Frits Nicolai, group controller, Trajectum
Ons® is the product of a clear vision, well made, and backed up by an enterprising team.
Nedap Healthcare develops the Ons® software service that supports healthcare facilities when it comes to planning, registering, and administering their healthcare services. Healthcare providers value the Ons® software suite because of its wide range of features combined with user-friendliness, whether it be at the office or at clients’ homes. Nedap provides Ons® across the VVT market (nursing homes, care homes, and home care organisations), as well as to customers operating in disabled care and mental healthcare. With over 1,500 healthcare facilities across the Netherlands using Nedap Ons®, Nedap is the market leader in the Dutch healthcare industry.
Developments in 2022
Nedap Ons®
Being the market leader empowers the Healthcare business unit to keep investing in the quality and features of the Ons® software suite, setting it apart even more from competing systems. This is an important reason whya large number of organisations both in the VVT market and in disabled care switched to Nedap Ons® in 2022.
In mental healthcare, too, numerous facilities have chosen Nedap Ons®. Sooner than expected, Nedap Healthcare has become the market leader in the mental healthcare market as well. This means that, as of 2022, Healthcare has the highest number of the Netherlands’ largest mental healthcare facilities among its customers. An important topic last year was the implementation of the ‘Zorgprestatiemodel’, a new funding model that became effective in the mental healthcare domain on 1 January 2022. Thanks to its development capability, Healthcare was the only party to successfully implement this new billing model before the deadline. As a result, customers maintained a healthy cash flow and were able to keepfocusing on providing good healthcare services.
Unify Ons®
The extent to which software supports staff at healthcare facilities in doing their day-to-day work is a long-term success driver for Nedap in the healthcare market. Given that there are many different roles and jobs in the healthcare domain, the software needs to meet a wide range of different requirements and preferences. The challenge is to support this diversity of use and users without making the suite more complex. Healthcare has, therefore, embarked on a project called ‘Unify Ons®’ to develop new architecture for the Ons® software. The new architecture aims to facilitate specific user groups in the best way possible in their daily work through smart combination of a number of standard reusable information blocks on one single screen. Nedap Healthcare has developed a design language that leads to the user experiencing the combination of blocks as a logical and consistently designed software suite. Over the past financial year, great progress was made on the development of this architecture and the first reusable blocks have meanwhile been released. We expect this way of working to give our software developers’ productivity a considerable boost over the coming years.
Business unit structure
In 2021, Healthcare started implementing a new organisational structure for its software development activities. Instead of having a large number of small development teams, the business unit decided to pool these teams around specific areas, such as patient file, logistics, and administration. The idea is to be more flexible and effective in using the available development capability and to streamline the process of setting development priorities. In 2022, implementation of this new way of working was completed and the first positive effects are already visible.Better healthcare
The Healthcare business unit strives to improve healthcare in the Netherlands. It does that through a free digital health platform called Caren, which is a Personal Health Environment that gives people control of their own healthcare environment, helping carers organise care, share information, and plan tasks and treatments. This is how Caren helps make healthcare more effective and more efficient.The aim is to facilitate and stimulate optimal collaboration between various healthcare facilities and thus improve healthcare.
Nedap also invests in promoting effective collaboration between healthcare facilities. In this context, data interoperability based on standards is a spearhead and Nedap plays a key role in the development of infrastructure for Nuts, an open-source platform for trusted, secure, and accessible sharing of health-related information over the internet. The ultimate aim is to facilitate and stimulate optimal collaboration between various healthcare facilities and thus improve healthcare. Thanks to Nuts, data can be consulted at the source and does not have to be entered separately in each system. This means no more manual copying of data, reduces the chance of data protection breaches, and ensures data minimisation. Nuts has meanwhile been adopted by dozens of software vendors in the healthcare domain.
Cybersecurity
Nedap invests in the security and robustness of its software systems on an ongoing basis. Aside from internal procedures and design requirements for software development projects, the various certification bodies conduct annual audits. Nedap also engages outside firms for penetration testing using ethical hackers. However, these efforts were not able to prevent a data breach in Caren in late 2022. A vulnerability was found that had been abused. It turned out that documents had been downloaded. Thanks to resolute action, a suspect was arrested soon after the breach was reported. As yet, there is no reason to believe that the documents have been distributed. In the end, the incident led to us gaining important insights that we will use to further optimise crisis management and crisis communication protocols. Additionally, it reasserted the Nedap-wide urgency behind continued investment in cybersecurity.
