Marente, one of the largest providers of aged care in the Netherlands, is using Microsoft technology to lay the foundations for a new paradigm in healthcare. By adopting a cloud-based platform, Marente has gained flexibility, stability and continuity to support changing care models, improved data access, and better decision-making across the organisation.
Jan Keijzer, IT Manager, Marente
“We’ve made our accountants very happy.”
Marente
Healthcare (aged care, home care, intramural care and physical rehabilitation)
A legacy IT landscape that could not support increasing care intensity, distributed work, secure data access and future healthcare demands
Rapid Circle Cloud Workplace built on Microsoft 365, Azure, Power Platform and managed cloud services
A more flexible, secure and resilient IT foundation enabling better data usage, support for remote care and improved operational efficiency
With roughly 2,600 employees, many volunteers and four divisions, Marente provides home care, intramural care and physical rehabilitation. But care is changing.
“The aging population will define the future of health care,” says Jan Keijzer, IT manager at Marente. “Care will continue to become more intensive and prolonged, with more people needing care at the same time. And there will be less people to do all this work. Already, the average level of care our clients need is rising and our homes are full, raising the bar for admission. As a result, many people that need complex care remain living at home. This obviously brings challenges for us at every level.”
Like most care providers in the Netherlands, Marente needed to phase out much of its IT infrastructure and applications to be able to embrace inevitable changes. They were quick to realise that a cloud-based platform could provide the flexibility, stability and continuity they needed.
Rapid Circle supports Marente with the Rapid Circle Cloud Workplace, a custom solution that provides a completely new ICT landscape tailored to the specific needs of healthcare organisations. In addition to replacing outdated infrastructure and applications, this includes:
This enables organisations like Marente to:
How does better data and infrastructure improve care? While this may be hard to quantify, the improvements are hard to deny. Care workers now have better access to information using mobile devices, giving them access to crucial data no matter their location, which has made a significant difference in day-to-day work.
Thanks to Power BI, Marente can now access data from two separate EHR systems from a single dashboard. This enables management staff to run their own analyses on production data, improving planning and insight into targets. In the future, this data will be used to predict care needs and duration, improving efficiency and decision-making.
No longer having single points of failure in the IT organisation has also reduced stress related to infrastructure and application maintenance. As Jan Keijzer puts it: “I sleep better now.”
“Quality of care is what we need to be focusing on,” says Jan Keijzer. “Cloud infrastructure, integration between Azure and the rest of our landscape and easy, safe access to data will have an important role in that.”
With Microsoft 365 and Azure, Marente now has more freedom to innovate, explore and lead the transformation of care in their region.
Marente moved to the cloud to support changing care models, reduce dependency on on-premises expertise, and ensure continuity, security and scalability in a distributed 24/7 healthcare environment.
Marente faced increasing care demand, staff shortages, aging infrastructure and single points of failure in IT, limiting flexibility and increasing operational risk.
Marente uses Microsoft 365, Azure, Power BI, Power Platform and Microsoft Teams as part of its Rapid Circle Cloud Workplace.
Centralised dashboards and mobile access to data allow care workers and management to access relevant information when and where needed, supporting planning, staffing and quality of care.
Rapid Circle supports both technological transformation and organisational change, allowing healthcare providers to determine the pace of adoption while addressing different levels of digital proficiency.
