At the beginning of the corona crisis, the Malteser Hilfsdienst in Koblenz had to react quickly. The aim was to optimise the internal communication with emergency services and volunteers in case of pandemic missions. Reliable standby communication was sought in order to organize an emergency task force in a timely manner without having to rely on apps or bidirectional communication.
SMS solution saves time in crisis coordination at Malteser Hilfsdienst
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The initial situation
The Malteser Hilfsdienst is a Catholic relief organisation and provider of in-patient health and social care facilities, operating nationwide. Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, they have been in a difficult situation that led to an internal restructuring. The organisation needs to be able to react quickly in case of short-term interventions in hospitals, old people’s homes or in disaster control. It also needs to coordinate care assistants efficiently and directly.
Almost everyone has come into contact with Malteser Hilfsdienst at some time or another. They may have offered your last first-aid course or support parents or grandparents with the life-saving “home emergency call”. Also, the ambulance services of the Malteser can be seen everywhere in the townscape. This is no surprise, since with more than 35,000 full-time staff members, Malteser Hilfsdienst is one of the largest German employers in the health and social sector.
The decision-making process
Florian Thillmann, head of the “Information and Communication Technology” department, is also a volunteer at Malteser Hilfsdienst and is mainly responsible for the technical and IT division. He is also a software developer, so it was only natural that he should take on the urgent communication problem.
First of all, messenger, email and SMS solutions were tested. “It was important to me that the final solution was capable of unidirectional communication. The staff application had to function independently of data networks such as 3G, LTE and WLAN. Also, additional costs due to app installations had to be avoided.
There are different staff positions at the Malteser Hilfswerk, comparable to the fire brigade system. The SMS dispatch by A2P messaging can be coordinated centrally by the respective decision-makers in the operational centre. So in the end, only an SMS solution came into question as a means of information”, Thillmann describes his decision process.
When evaluating different SMS gateway providers, the following options were decisive for Florian Thillmann: reliability, ease of use and price.
Other relevant factors were also significantly taken into account in his considerations. The provider had to be based in Germany, there had to be certain available interfaces and their documentation and the support were also important. The web interface (API) was also to be addressed via a self-developed application in the Koblenz operations center.
“I was looking for a possibility, which would ensure the flow of information from the staff to the emergency services at all times in an acute crisis situation. To achieve this, a fast and reliable network solution had to be found,” says the dedicated software developer.
What counts apart from the price is the service and delivery quality
“I rely most heavily on the reliability of the delivery of SMS messages. When sending SMS with seven.io we achieve a 100% accessibility of the nursing staff and emergency services. In this case, the SMS solution does not give us a competitive advantage, since it was used in the situation center for emergency services in the context of Covid-19,” Florian Thillmann continues.
The software developer did not want to have to worry about anything after the product was installed: “I preferred a quick and easy solution, unpack, switch on – and go! What I personally still like about writing SMS is that you limit yourself to the essentials and communicate consciously”, smiles Florian Thillann.
“The big advantage of sending SMS is that we are no longer dependent on a data network. The direct messages always arrive! If there is no more data network, we cannot access the WLAN anymore, so in the Corona crisis it became urgently necessary to restructure the administration with the volunteers.”
According to Thillmann, another advantage that could not be ignored was that the volunteers could be reached on every mobile phone. It is not self-evident that everybody owns a smartphone nowadays.
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Source of header picture: iStock.com/ollo