Smartlockr Blog: Email and Data Security

User-friendly and secure email for Zorgspectrum Het Zand

Written by Smartlockr | Jul 1, 2021 8:28:00 AM

Improving quality of life for the elderly, people with acquired brain injury or otherwise in need of medical rehabilition." That's what Zorgspectrum Het Zand does. Everything people were used to doing at home, they can do here as well.

 

Care is in-house. IT not so much

"We focus on the thing we're exceptional at," says Sander Smit, automation consultant at Het Zand:

 

“My job is to consult on all things related to ICT. We're a health provider for the Zwolle area and specialise in helping people with dementia. We also have a high care hospice and provide care for people with acquired brain injuries, a lot of whom live with us on site.

We focus on providing good care, not on ICT. We do operate a servicedesk internally, because we want the people manning it to know our orgnisation and its people. We also manage our applications in-house. Everything else is delegated to external parties, including system and network admin. And now a provider for safe emailing is added to the list!”

 

Communication to and from Het Zand

“Because we mainly cater to in-house patients, a lot of communication happens verbally and in person. But we do of course maintain client files and a client portal, which can be accessed by ourselves as well as clients' proxies and representatives.

Then there are a number of external parties we communate with regularly. This mostly concerns information beyond the scope of our client portal and is sent to private email addresses, other care providers, legal service providers, courthouses…it's a very diverse list.”

Lack of secure and easy communication

Using portals proved beneficial, but it fell short of offering a wholesome solution: "Not everything can be done with portals. In most cases it's impossible to give all people the necessary access through a portal, forcing us to resort to use (unsecured) email, and in some cases even fax machines. Not exactly hacker-proof.

 

One of the issues in healthcare is that a lot of people are great with people, not with computers.

When looking for an email solution, Het Zand wanted to make sure that each and every one of their employees would be able to send and receive emails not just securely, but easily too:

"User friendliness was our most important issue. That's why we included a large number of people in the decision making process. Eventually we shortlisted 3 providers and had them demo their product

 

“When assessing our options we found that Smartlockr came out on top,
both rationally and instinctively.”

 

The user friendliness of the other email solutions clearly didn't match that of Smartlockr. Added to that we got the impression that Smartlockr would be more of a partner and less of a supplier."

 

“I think Smartlockr is a better fit for any healthcare organisation"

"Lastly, the onboarding process generally went well. With any onboarding there's always a few tense moments, but I did enjoy and appreciate the cooperative approach Smartlockr brought to the mix. Any issues were resolved quickly. We ended up testing the Smartlockr plug-in with 11 people, whose response was very enthusiastic.


"I chose a group of testers based on their lack or knowledge and/or interest in computers. Even they knew how to use Smartlockr rightaway. That was all the proof I needed."