Alivia in English

People with long-term or complex care and support needs often have several care providers from different disciplines and sectors, such as GPs, home nurses, psychologists, social workers, family support workers and specialists. Good cooperation is therefore all the more important:

• Agreeing and scheduling tasks between these healthcare providers and communicating effectively are therefore essential.
• The person receiving assistance must be able to make their own choices and keep track of the services being provided.

Alivia makes this possible. With Alivia, you can create a digital care and support plan that includes:

• Life goals: what the person with a need for care and support wants to be able to do, to be capable of doing or to achieve in their daily life in terms of health, housing, leisure, relationships and so on.
• Care goals: what we want to achieve by means of the care and assistance we provide.
• Care tasks: what tasks need to be performed for that purpose and who has undertaken to take responsibility for those tasks.

In addition to the caregiver themselves, the care and support team will also include professional care providers, family caregivers and the person's loved ones.

The use of Alivia is currently restricted to a limited group of test and pilot users. The application is not yet available to the general public.

Once Alivia is a reality, it will be available as a web-based platform and as a mobile app.

Alivia will provide added value not only to all individuals with complex or long-term care and support needs, but also to the various care providers, informal carers and loved ones involved in the care or support process.

The types of person who may benefit include:

• People with multiple conditions who are seeing different healthcare providers
• People in vulnerable situations, either alone or in families
• People with a disability
• Elderly people with age-related illnesses who are receiving support in the home
• People with palliative care needs
• People with long-term mental problems, whether or not combined with physical health problems

Initially, Alivia will focus on:

• Individuals with complex care and support needs in their home context
• Primary care providers, such as general practitioners, home nurses or caregivers, paramedics and others
• Welfare workers from general social welfare services, family care or those caring for people with disabilities
• Informal care providers, including those who provide informal care at home

For the person who needs care and support:

• Can clearly express wishes and decide what is done in terms of help and care
• Maintains an overview of what is happening when and being done by whom
• Has the same information as his/her care and support team
• Can easily track and manage who is part of the team that cares for and supports him/her

For the care provider:

• Collaborate more easily and effectively with other care providers
• Clear objectives and agreed tasks
• Easily and securely exchange (non-urgent) information or messages to schedule and plan the person's care
• An overview of what care has taken place when and what should happen when
• Access to the same information and everyone is aware of the patient's care and support needs.
• A secure, digitally accessible place to keep track of the care and support plan and its implementation.
• Linked to other government digital care and support tools (such as BelRAI and Vitalink) and can be integrated into their own software (coming soon).

The initial version of Alivia has 5 components or modules: life goals, care and support goals, care and support tasks, care and support team and communication.

These are the basic components that are needed in order to create a care and support plan.

Alivia will not be limited to these initial modules. In time, there will also be calendar and calendar functions, dashboards with notifications of important messages, the ability to import medical and non-medical information about the person (medication, examination results, living situation, etc.).

In this module, the person with care and support needs will be able to formulate their life goals. These can relate to all aspects of life:

• Housing  
• Health
• Work  
• Relational connectedness  
• Leisure time activities and creativity  
• Sexuality  
• Mobility  
• Training and education  
• Autonomy  
• Competences 

A number of methodologies (Doelzoeker, Zorgesperanto, Clever, etc.) are in use that use questions to prompt patients to record their life goals. The results can be transferred into Alivia and serve as a starting point for targeted care planning.

Alivia will make it possible for care and support goals to be drawn up: what do we want to achieve by means of the care being provided? For example: we want the person to be able to live independently at home, (to continue to) pursue a certain hobby and so on.

These follow on logically from the person's life goals.

These targets can also come from existing tools to measure a person's need for care, such as the BelRAI survey.  

In Alivia, care and support goals can be created, managed and shared digitally with everyone directly involved in achieving those goals (the care and support team).

Alivia takes the care and support goals and links them to care and support tasks of a more specific nature or care agreements that caregivers establish and distribute among themselves. Each care and support task has a responsible person and a status so that they can be followed up as effectively as possible.

Examples of care tasks include: 

• Verification by the caregiver that medications were taken correctly and on time 
• Daily exercises with physiotherapist to relieve knee pain
• A caregiver from family care comes by every evening to wash the person and help them go to bed
• Weekly therapy with psychologist to boost self-confidence and prevent depression
• Going for walks with the neighbour 3 times a week

Alivia will also include a clear overview of who everyone who is taking on a role in providing the care and support – the care and support team. In addition to their names, you can quickly find out how to contact them through Alivia.

These include both informal caregivers (neighbour, children, spouse, etc.) and professional caregivers from the health and welfare sector (social worker, general practitioner, physiotherapist, family support worker, endocrinologist, home care services, etc.).

In Alivia, each of these people is assigned a role.

A care coordinator may be designated from within the team by mutual agreement:

• The care coordinator keeps an overview of the care and support plan and monitors the situation to ensure that everyone is carrying out their tasks. If the person with a care and support need takes on this coordination themselves, this is known as self-management. This self-management is always the starting point.
• In cases where this person is unable or unwilling to take on coordination or the care need is too complex (e.g. a care and support team with care providers from different disciplines or rapidly evolving care and support needs), a care provider belonging to the care and support team takes on this care coordination.

Care providers (from health and welfare), informal carers and the individuals with care and support needs must be able to communicate with each other easily and securely about the care and support plan or about (and with) the person in question. These are messages that are not urgent, but are still important in order to keep the patient and each of the care providers involved informed about what has happened, what to take into account, unexpected events, etc.

This begins by keeping a diary or journal. At the moment, this is often done in writing, such as in a notebook left on the patient's kitchen table. This poses all manner of risks in terms of safety and accuracy.

Alivia will enable all this to take place in a secure and easily shareable way in the form of short pieces of text, a photo and possibly an attachment.

• Reform of the primary care in Flanders: focus on goal-oriented and integrated carepdf bestand3.3mb
• Meet Alivia: goal oriented care in Flandersdoc bestand132.9kb