The company Valtes from Assen won the regional Healthcare Innovation Award of Northern Netherlands this week with an informal care application. With this app, the company of Erjen Derks and John Beuving now also has a chance to win the National Healthcare Innovation Award, the winner of which will be announced this spring.
The intention is that the app can be used from the spring.
Derks and Beuving, from Beilen, have developed an app that functions as a digital assistant for informal caregivers. In this way, Valtes is responding to the development in which informal care is playing an increasingly important role. “Many people do not call themselves informal caregivers, but they do care for their parents or brother or sister in need of help. And they often still have many questions about this,” says Derks.
“For example, what kind of support does someone need?” he continues. To get an answer, after downloading the app you will be asked a number of personal questions – “filling in private details is not necessary” – so that an idea can be formed of which questions the person in need of care may encounter.
“Think about very accessible things, such as where exactly to knock if you need help,” Derks explains. “But also what exactly you need to do to provide the right care, how to order a regional taxi or how to draw up a will. Nine times out of ten you do not know the answer and you are lagging behind the facts. With such a digital assistant, the right information reaches the right person at the right time.”
According to the jury, Valtes’ informal care application was designated as a regional winner because it is an innovation that responds to the realization that a sustainable future of care and health is not possible without informal caregivers. According to the jury, technology – including Artificial Intelligence (AI) – has an increasingly important role to assist and relieve informal caregivers.
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