Emfit Corp. (USA)

QS+ProCare

PERSONAL HOME CARE

PROVIDING THE FEELING OF SAFETY FOR CUSTOMERS WHILE IMPROVING EFFICIENCY

Photo of Aki Kuivalainen from Stella Kotipalvelut / Stella Home Care

Aki Kuivalainen

Business Director
Stella Kotipalvelut Ltd

Could you please introduce yourself?

I am Aki Kuivalainen, business director at Stella Kotipalvelut Ltd. My responsibility at Stella is developing knowledge-led healthcare and wellness services. Stella Kotipalvelut is a Finnish company that delivers home services created for Finnish homes. Our job is to produce quality solutions and services to enable people to live better, happier and safer lives in their own homes. We operate on a national level from five places. We visited over 180 000 Finnish homes in 2017 so we can call ourselves experts in happy, everyday life in Finland.

What are your services and who are your clients?

Our services include healthcare, cleaning, childcare, safety phone and help work, and knowledge-led home care services. Our clients are Finnish families, homes, towns and joint municipal authorities.

"When conditions where the customers feel safe are created, they become active in their safe and familiar home environments"

What do you think are today’s biggest challenges in senior care?

I think that one challenge in senior care is organization focus instead of focusing on customer orientation. The conversation typically revolves around how customer needs can be answered consistently by optimizing existing resources. I don’t think that we can talk about consistency because customers are individuals. 

A busy feeling in customer encounters is another challenge. This is a result of organization focused thinking that assumes all customers need the same service and all employees can deliver these services to customers in the same form. 

The third challenge is customers’ feeling of safety – or more like the lack thereof. When conditions where the customers feel safe are created they become active in their safe and familiar home environments. Some even go to their mailbox or a nearby grocery store when they know help is available both reactively and with the help of monitoring and analytics that is based on processing passive data. And naturally, when this happens, the rush of service staff is reduced and client meetings become even higher in quality. We already have a lot of experience and observations from this.

"Using that knowledge to make a change in the care of a customer without having the customer spend an examination period in a ward. We are talking about a significant increase in individual wellbeing"

Has EMFIT QS helped you with these challenges and if it has, how?

EMFIT QS plays a significant role in producing information (data) for us about our customers’ wellbeing and circadian rhythms. The amount of rest, sleep stages and activity are also important, of course, but they may be emphasized more among athletes. EMFIT QS is a reliable source of data to produce information about a customer’s wellbeing. With the help of sleep tracking, we have also been able to verify changes in the circadian rhythms of elderly and have been able to make an impact in turning those changes in the right direction to improve the wellbeing of the customer. 

The single greatest sign of the role of data provided by EMFIT QS is using that knowledge to make a change in the care of a customer without having the customer spend an examination period in a ward and traveling hundreds of kilometers to be examined. We are talking about a significant increase in individual well-being.

“The efficiency of our personnel in home care has improved in the metrics of functional efficiency and better-quality encounters by approximately 20%”

Has the efficiency of your staff/nurses improved and if it has, how significantly would you say it has improved? Have there been any cost reductions, for example?

The efficiency of our personnel in-home care has improved the metrics of functional efficiency and better-quality encounters by approximately 20%. We have reached these results by combining data from different sources to an IoT platform which has a clean user interface that supports caretakers’ orientation towards each customer encounter. Instead of taking a mobile user interface view to a patient information system, a caretaker can get a view of a client’s situation with a quick glance from the user interface we have created.

Have your staff or clients been happy with the technology and quality of service of Emfit?

We have been very happy with the accuracy and reliability of the data EMFIT QS provides. There haven’t really been quality deviations in the devices, which is proof of Emfit’s advanced production processes.

"The most important strength of EMFIT QS is the reliability and accuracy of data"

What do you think are the strengths of EMFIT QS in home care? What about weaknesses?

The most important strength of EMFIT QS is the reliability and accuracy of data. Stella’s experts interpret and observe deviations in the data for each client. A professional is needed to make interpretations and decisions about a client’s care or services. Even the smallest change noticed in the data is valuable. According to a study done by THL, the average length of visitation and observation time is 40 minutes per day; we get to 24 hours per day by using data sources for unending observation. EMFIT QS produces approximately 50% of this observation time for us.

Improve the efficiency of your nursing and personal home care services and measure the wellbeing of your customers