How Ambulance Care Groningen makes colleagues self-reliant with SelfGuide

Ambulancezorg Groningen is responsible for ambulance transport in the province of Groningen, both emergency and scheduled transport. The organization wants to get to the patient as quickly as possible and provide the best possible quality care. That is why they continuously invest in improvements. The IT department supports this by facilitating, among other things, the electronic patient file on the ambulances, the digital message flow to the hospital and connections to the control room. Their goal is to relieve nurses as much as possible so that they can fully focus on the patient.

Like many healthcare organizations, Ambulance Care Groningen sees the application landscape becoming more complex, which requires a lot from colleagues in the workplace. The immediate reason for working with SelfGuide was the implementation of new schedule planning software, in which nurses mutate shifts, declare overtime and request time off. “Such software is business-critical in an organization that needs to be ready 24/7, but the many actions can be quite a challenge for nurses,” says Jos Klungers, ICT Manager at Ambulance Care Groningen.

SelfGuide was deliberately used to investigate how the tool can contribute to the adoption of new processes and applications. In this phase, the first instructions were created and then further refined based on usage and feedback. This gave Ambulancezorg Groningen a quick insight into the practical value of SelfGuide within the organization. Although he was not immediately looking for a solution to this challenge, he was introduced to SelfGuide for the first time at the Health & ICT fair.

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“I thought: 'This is handy, I immediately recognized the problem that SelfGuide solves: taking colleagues step by step and visually through new processes and applications, without complicated explanations. '

Jos Klungers, ICT Manager

The first encounter with SelfGuide was positive and showed that colleagues were actually helped to perform actions within applications. At the same time, the organization is still in a phase where the use of SelfGuide is being further developed and fine-tuned. SelfGuide has now also been used to introduce a new electronic health record (EPD).

Instructions have been made available, among other things, via a shortcut on the intranet, so that colleagues have easy access to relevant explanations. In addition, a link has also been made with TOPdesk, which makes SelfGuide instructions part of the wider provision of information to colleagues.

The technical implementation of SelfGuide went smoothly: the single-sign-on link was quickly arranged. Even in the first phase after implementation, the organization was well guided on location by SelfGuide with commissioning, by training various colleagues from Ambulance Care Groningen. Ambulance Care Groningen experiences SelfGuide as a supplier that proactively seeks contact, regularly asks how things are going and thinks along about improvements and new opportunities. “You give us the feeling that you don't just want to sell a product, but really want to support the customer,” says Jos.

SelfGuide is used, among other things, to guide colleagues step by step in various applications, from schedule planning to the EPD. The strength lies in its simplicity: with short, clear steps, users are literally guided through a system.

“The most important added value of SelfGuide is that you can easily include colleagues without IT affinity in an IT application and literally guide them through the screens. Instead of verbally explaining where the taskbar is, for example, they simply follow the steps,”

Jos Klungers, ICT Manager

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SelfGuide is also used for people from outside the organization. “At Ambulance Care Groningen, we also work with temporary workers. They have to log into our EPD even though they often do not know the internal procedures. By making instructions public to external parties, we can also share that information within the documentation they receive from us, so that they can quickly find their way around our systems,” says Jos.

Although the first applications are successful, the current focus is mainly on increasing SelfGuide's internal adoption. In the initial stages, the tool was still relatively unknown within the organization, so it is important to actively include colleagues in the use and possibilities. In addition, work is being done to further optimize the integrations with the intranet and TOPdesk. The goal is to provide instructions as accessible and visible as possible, so that colleagues will automatically encounter them in their daily work.

Ambulance care Groningen sees great potential to use SelfGuide more widely in the organization. The basis was laid with positive first experiences regarding schedule planning and the EPD. In the coming period, the focus will be on further adoption, visibility and integration within the application landscape. By embedding SelfGuide more strongly into existing systems such as the intranet and TOPdesk, the organization wants to ensure that instructions are always available in the right place at the right time. The wish is for more departments to actively take ownership of their instructions and that content remains up to date, so that colleagues can always rely on up-to-date information.

Jos Klungers actively recommends SelfGuide to fellow ambulance services facing similar software adoption challenges and sees SelfGuide as a product that you can offer to the end user on a platter. His advice to organizations that are unsure: “Request a free test license, try out SelfGuide and see for yourself how quickly it becomes clear that the tool is very useful,” Jos concludes.