Innovating the Norwegian healthcare systems through data and technology
twoday helps the agency develop systems that automate processes, free up employee time, and provide essential decision-making data.
Customer story
The Challenge
In 2020, the Norwegian Directorate of Health awarded a Framework Agreement to two suppliers for system development and maintenance of their entire system portfolio. Under this agreement, two portfolios of existing systems and new development were established. twoday is responsible for application management, application operations, further development, consulting, quality assurance, and deliveries for one of these portfolios. Since its inception in 2020, the Norwegian Directorate of Health has quickly grown to become one of twoday's largest customers.
The Solution
twoday provides a complete team for:
- Team management and agile team leadership
- Technical solution architecture
- Quality work, testing, and test management
- Security
- Application management and application operation
- Development, further development, troubleshooting, and maintenance (AM)
- On-call services
- Consultancy
The Norwegian Directorate of Health builds its solutions on the Microsoft platform, and they have a clear vision of moving their solutions to the cloud. This is an area where twoday, in collaboration with the customer, has a strong focus.
Several systems are already in the cloud, including the Common Contact Registry (FKR), which is a flagship system at the Norwegian Directorate of Health.
The team is divided into five specialized agile teams, each responsible for the maintenance of a sub-portfolio and/or development project. The team is led by the Team Leader, and each individual agile team has its own product queue that they manage in close collaboration with the customer's domain experts.
An agile methodology based on Scrum and Kanban is used. The customer has a product owner, and in some teams also an architect and technical personnel, while the supplier is responsible for detailed design, technology management, solution work, development, and test management/testing.
All systems are built on Microsoft .Net, SQLServer, and various supporting frameworks. Parts of the portfolio are based on Managed Services in Azure, but other systems use on-prem infrastructure provided through the Norwegian Health Network.
The Value
Among the systems developed and/or further developed by twoday through this agreement is a significant number of sector-specific systems for public services, decision-making systems, registries, common integration layers, and API layers, as well as the customer's data warehouse and insight solutions. These include the following systems:
HINT - The Norwegian Directorate of Health's integration platform. This is the foundation for almost all of the Directorate's systems. HINT takes care of communication between systems, both internally and externally. Encryption, authentication, and archiving are also central tasks for HINT. The same team also includes HAPI, which is a common API for external users.
Blue Prescription - supports cases where doctors apply for individual subsidies for medicines and nutritional products on a blue prescription or occupational injury coverage on behalf of patients. The team actively works on automating case processing and currently has over 80% automation, freeing up a tremendous amount of time for the 65 Helfo employees working with blue prescriptions. The solution is part of the Health Actor Portal, which is also further developed by the same team.
ELSA - Electronic Case Processing for Helfo related to health rights. Automatic processing of European health insurance cards (800,000 cases per year), the agency's case management system for the exchange of citizens' health rights across EU/EEA countries, and the actual country settlement that ensures Norwegian citizens' treatment in other EEA countries.
Common Contact Registry (FKR) - The solution is a shared component in the system landscape that ensures that information about contacts (people), organizations, and care providers is stored, updated, and secured in one place, unlike before when contact information was spread across all systems. The registry uses the Population Register for basic data. Today's solutions result in double maintenance of contacts and unnecessary data entry for Helfo. To reduce double updates and to ensure Helfo appears uniform towards its contacts, a common contact registry was needed.
Control Data - The Norwegian Directorate of Health's data warehouse. The solution uses PowerBI for visualization and reporting. The data warehouse contributes to the agency's insight work and provides management data and a basis for public reporting. The team has helped provide the Norwegian Directorate of Health with accurate and essential decision-making data in their pandemic response work and has been a source of information for the public.
Diet Planner - The Diet Planner is a tool used by nutritionists and schools to map and learn about diet. The team built the application based on an older version inherited from the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, and the food items are taken from the Food Composition Table at Matportalen.no. The team has contributed to improving the user experience of the application.
For health authorities to manage the pandemic, new digital solutions were needed for both disseminating information to the population and for reporting infection rates necessary for decision-makers. Many of our consultants have actively been involved in the work during the pandemic. Among other things, the daily infection rates were extracted from the APIs that we operates. That's something to be proud of!