Digital supervision — sensors and/or camera technology in the home

Digitalisation can be increasingly important for enabling municipalities to offer quality health and care services.

Services with sensor technology are often included in so-called security packages in which alerts/alarms/signals are sent to the service or the municipality's response service. These can also be combined with a camera for image transfer so that the response service can log on at the agreed time or image transfer can be activated in the event that an alarm is triggered, resulting in the required measures.

The Norwegian National Programme for Personal Connected Health and Care has recommended that this service is implemented nationally. This recommendation is based on the benefits from the development phase of this service.

Other essential prerequisites to be solved to ensure the volume and success of this kind of service include good systems for the response service, procurement practice, integration of patient record systems, changes in mindset and, most of all, solutions that meet the users’ needs.

From 2013 to 2016, 31 municipalities were included as development municipalities in the programme. Currently, in the escalation phase, 80% of the municipalities in Norway are engaged in the programme. The NVP is providing a wide range of implementation tools and support to the municipalities engaged in the programme. The tools and support offered by the programme comprise:

• National Recommendations
• Guidelines for service innovation and benefits realization management
• Guidelines for implementation: Roadmap and quick guide
• Courses in “Velferdsteknologiens ABC”
• Process support
• Conferences, workshops, seminars

Since 2013, digital supervision or various individual sensors have been tried out in the Lister region, Østre-Agder, the Værnes region, Vestre Toten, the southern counties, Bergen, Tromsø, Skien, Stord, Larvik and Lindås municipalities. From the early trial period until the present time, the municipalities appear to have gained increasing benefits. The service seems to be particularly relevant to people with cognitive impairment in order to prevent them from “walking” at night, in both an institutional-based care and a home-based services setting, as well as reducing the need for one-man staffing in the habilitation service.

Different municipalities will have a different potential for savings.

Currently, 80% of the municipalities in Norway are included in activities that are supported by the National Programme for Personal Connected Health and Care.

The municipalities have also worked systematically on profit planning, as well as identifying good measurement indicators for welfare technology, evaluation and documentation.

From 2017, the NVP programme entered the dissemination and escalation phase. The transition to operational phase can be critical. For some municipalities, the transition will be greater than for other municipalities as they have chosen different ways of implementing the new services. Some municipalities have chosen to utilise the technology solutions and set up the organization, adapted and further developed the service as more service recipients arrived. Others have chosen to set up and prepare the service for a high number of users before deploying the technology, which has required a lot of advance work. Regardless of which approach the municipalities have chosen, it is important that the transition to ordinary operations is considered early in the process.

• Savings: More targeted visits from the home service. “Digital supervision” allows to reduce assigned service time. The services are more targeted by service recipients who are visited when they trigger an alarm and require help, where previously they had received visits as part of permanent supervision (Farsund municipality, 2016). Digital supervision can lead to a reduction in the growth of health and care services through the effective use of resources (Risør municipality, 2016). Digital surveillance that includes cameras also makes fewer visits in response to error alarms as it allows the service to log on and “see” what’s going on. This provides potentially significant savings for the municipality while also increasing the security of both users and employees.

• Increased quality of service. For service recipients and relatives, less physical supervision means they are not woken up by service employees who are checking up on them. This means they will sleep better. In home-based services, it is difficult to arrive in sufficient time to prevent people from wandering around at night or falling. However, with alerts from the sensors fewer assistance is needed and users can bee found earlier than they would otherwise (Hansen & Moe, 2016). 

• Remain longer at home. In Bergen municipality, users, relatives and employees believe that the technology helps users to remain longer at home with reduced service(Bergen municipality, 2016b). This has been confirmed by several examples from Lindås and Grimstad municipality, as well as several municipalities in the Lister region (Lyngdal, Hægebostad municipality and Flekkefjord, 2016). Lindås and Grimstad municipalities also report that patients with technology installed in their homes can return home earlier after hospital stays, providing savings in terms of less hospital bed occupancy following discharge and fewer short-term stays in nursing homes (Lindås municipality; Grimstad municipality, 2016).

• Digital supervision in the habilitation service. Decisions on digital supervision in the habilitation service must be made in accordance with Chapter 9 of the Health and Care Services Act. Several municipalities that have tried out digital supervision in the habilitation service believe this leads to less use of measures for preventing injury in emergency situations (Risør municipality, 2016; Farsund municipality, 2016). Farsund, Grimstad, Risør, Tvedestrand and Meråker municipalities have all seen the positive benefits of digital supervision and can point to less recruitment or a reduction in the number of night-time employees in the 24-hour manned care homes for the mentally retarded (Farsund, Grimstad, Risør, Tvedestrand and Meråker municipalities, 2016). Grimstad municipality has estimated that a night watchman corresponds to 1.8 man years and a saving of NOK 1,370,000 per year (Grimstad municipality, 2016). Selbu municipality has been able to reduce 1:1 staffing per day for a user who has been given a door alarm (Selbu municipality, 2016)