'Remote monitoring' ensures safety and good care for Estinea residents

Estinea is an organisation with 900 staff and over 400 volunteers caring for people with disabilities in the Dutch Achterhoek and Twente regions. The customer wanted to ensure that night staff could concentrate on their tasks by keeping an eye on the operation of all ICT equipment via remote monitoring. Tiziane van Dinteren is ICT coordinator at Estinea. Besides monitoring, she also wanted staff to deal with fewer 'alerts' and breakdowns. She said: "Error messages or malfunctions are forwarded directly to Ascom with the Remote Monitoring solution, so that their experts can fix or even prevent the malfunctions, without us having to do anything."

One central monitoring solution

Estinea has 41 sites with hundreds of active systems and endpoints that, in theory, could be subject to failure. As Estinea operates on a single network, Ascom is able to read all reports from the different locations via one central solution. Hardware such as sensors, base stations and software applications generate data, which enters the cloud environment anonymized (it only concerns devices). The Ascom service team is automatically notified by e-mail, if the data shows that a monitored component is not functioning correctly. The service team then picks up the report immediately.

As an Ascom customer with the remote monitoring solution, Estinea enjoys the highest priority in case of malfunctions: Ascom guarantees to respond to the most critical priority A  reports within two hours, working remotely on the solution and sending a technical engineer to the site, if necessary. Ascom can resolve many malfunctions remotely, which saves travel time and thus increases the 'uptime' for all systems at the healthcare provider.

Technology is just technology

"It may sound a bit strange, but to our staff, technology is just technology," says Van Dinteren about the convenience of Ascom's monitoring and service desk. "Everything we do and decide, we do with the care of our clients in mind. Remote monitoring from Ascom ensures that care staff know that faults are being worked on when they occur. If a base station is down and we cannot call, our people no longer have to go to the helpdesk to create a ticket and then wait for Ascom. We know that the notification has automatically already reached Ascom, and they will deal with it quickly."

This is a theoretical example, as Van Dinteren says he has not yet experienced failures of that magnitude with the Ascom system. "It is mainly about the sense of security. Night staff in particular do not have time to deal with breakdowns when residents need to be cared for. Thanks to remote monitoring, they now know that they can always be there for their clients, even if there are technical problems."