The Vlaamse Sociale Bescherming (VSB) is a government agency which supports people with a greater need for medical assistance. They provide additional compensation to those needing extra care during an extended period of time. For example by helping them pay for a wheelchair or a nursing home.
EMMA: creating value for suppliers of walking aids
The first application we developed for VSB is called EMMA.
EMMA streamlines delivery of walking aids by enabling suppliers to request, deliver and invoice all sorts of mobility devices (simple walking aids, wheelchairs, electric scooters, …). This solution makes it possible for suppliers to send out a request for a walking aid to VSB on behalf of a care recipient. Moving through the eHealth platform, a request arrives at VSB where the compensation and the chosen type of walking aid is verified and approved or disapproved. When approved, the supplier can deliver the walking aid to the individual and invoice the approved compensation amount to the care unit (Zorgkas) of the care recipient.
The team started to create a service blueprint in March 2018, and released a minimum viable product in December of the same year. Since the jurisdiction over compensation of walking aids was only just transferred from the federal to the regional government, the exact scope of the project and the required functionality wasn’t completely clear from the start. Kunlabora and VSB had to collaborate closely and respond to change quickly to achieve exemplary performance of the application. The main technical challenge in this project was the integration with the eHealth platform, which provides secure traffic between EMMA and other VSB backend applications.
APRO: creating value for suppliers
While EMMA was still being tweaked (start of 2019), VSB asked the team to start developing another application, APRO. This application enables suppliers of walking aids to register their devices at the VSB for the purpose of providing compensation for them. When a manufacturer develops a new type of walking aid or changes an existing one, he will use APRO to register it. Every month, an advisory committee gathers and decides which new or altered products will be eligible for compensation in accordance with the law. When a manufacturer ends the lifecycle of a product, this status can be reflected in the APRO application hereby removing the product from the list of compensated products.
The main challenge in APRO was time pressure. Suppliers were eagerly waiting to register their new products and their product price indexations with VSB. A first version of APRO (with the needed functionality for the manufacturers) was released in April 2019.