More time for care through digitalisation
NOVENTI Care develops software to meet the complex requirements of the healthcare industry
“Digitalisation in care has nothing to do with robots,” says Julius Knoche with a laugh. Whenever the topic comes up, people seem to think of talking automatons with arms and legs to support people with special needs, feeding and bathing them, helping them to go to bed, and maybe reading them a bedtime story while doing so. However, at the Adlershof-based NOVENTI Care GmbH, which Knoche heads as managing director, it’s all about developing care management software and the successful interconnection with other digital systems.
“A nursing care shift involves a great many tasks,” says the Bremen native, who studied communications and cultural studies at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen. After graduating in 2011, Knoche worked as a management consultant. He then arrived in Berlin in May 2019, where NOVENTI had taken over the Adlershof-based company BoS&S, which stands for the German for user-oriented systems and software. In October 2023, the department for care management software was sold to Volaris Group. “We are looking forward to helping the team of Julius Knoche to drive his vision for the care market forward and continue to write the success story that they have begun,” says Volaris manager Raimund Schlotman, emphatically.
The challenge is to develop software that meets the requirements of an increasingly complex healthcare system. “Accounting is very demanding,” says Knoche. Any documentation must include the type of care given—outpatient, inpatient, or by relatives—and the current well-being of the person being cared for. Moreover, the rules for services, costs, and reimbursement can differ significantly between the German federal states. They depend not only on the activities of individual care agencies or facilities but on the places of residence of those in need of care. Consequently, software that meets all these demands must be fairly complex by design.
The tasks of a home healthcare service include advising affected individuals and their relatives in matters pertaining to care. They also support them with food delivery and the organisation of errands and transport. The same applies to assistance with housekeeping—cooking, say, or cleaning the flat. In addition, body care and personal care must be performed and billed, which can vary in intensity depending on the care degree.
Effective planning of staff and routes is therefore essential for outpatient services. It helps that the Adlershof-based experts are investing decades’ worth of experience. “We develop the software for all these details ourselves,” says Knoche. NOVENTI Care developed a mobile platform that features the “myCortex” application and the smartphone app “myCara”. It works both online and offline and offers voice recognition for it to comply with data protection regulations. This saves time when documenting care measures and facilitates the billing of working time and services without the tedious filling out of forms.
However, not everything is that simple because legislation is lagging behind technological progress in some areas, such as digital signatures. “We are forced to tell some of our customers that we can’t offer this to a legally secure extent,” explains Knoche. This makes frequent talks with industry associations and healthcare companies necessary in order to get out of such grey areas and influence legislation. “When innovation, regulation, and operative needs clash, that’s when it gets interesting,” says Knoche.
In doing so, it is important to have staff that are familiar with both software development and key issues of professional care. They deal with the highly interdependent regulation of health insurance providers and strict regulatory provisions of data protection law. A large portion of the staff previously worked in the care sector, says managing director Knoche. They weren’t recruited, but some couldn’t continue working in care for physical reasons.
The company's effort has paid off. Already, 1,500 care agencies all over Germany are using the software from Adlershof. In homes, the staff situation has become worse in recent times. Management is becoming more time-consuming, staff is lacking, and so agencies have to resort to temping. The temping agencies’ services are expensive. More reliable digitalisation could help because it facilitates investing more time and attention to those in need of care, says Knoche.
Dr Paul Janositz for Adlershof Journal