Avoided the need for additional staff, freed up time and improved the quality of patient care. These are the benefits that Stad Municipality has gained from using Vitalthings’ digital monitoring system over the past two years.
Stad Municipality and digital monitoring by Vitalthings
Since 2024, Stad has been using Somnofy (the predecessor to Vitalthings’ Guardian H10) for digital monitoring in care homes and sheltered accommodation across the municipality. This has yielded the following benefits:
- Cost avoided: Dismantled the on-call night shift / Avoided increasing staffing levels
- Time saved: Less driving in the home care service / Potential to cut nearly 180 home visits each night
- Quality: Improved sleep quality / avoided waking patients / identified worsening pain, infection, palliative care)
For Stad Municipality, digital supervision is a key piece in a vast jigsaw puzzle aimed at resolving structural challenges. Barbro Longva is the Head of Health and Care for Stad Municipality in Nordfjord – a sprawling municipality with 9,500 residents, separated by high mountains and fjords, which means that travel between residents, hospitals and care homes is both time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Longva believes it is important for the local authority to take a strategic and long-term approach to these challenges.
– The challenges relate to recruitment, geography and demographics. To tackle them, it is important to lay a solid foundation and take a long-term, strategic approach. Culture, economics and technology all play key roles here, says Longva.
The battle for skilled workers
Within the health sector, she sees a challenge in the fact that hospitals and local authorities are competing for the same professionals. This has implications for costs and challenges local authorities to rethink their organisation and how tasks are carried out.
“Given that the number of elderly people and those in need of care is constantly increasing, we need to put tools in place that will enable us to avoid having to recruit more healthcare staff,” says Longva.
«Digital solutions can generate data that makes it easier and more efficient to achieve better collaboration between municipal health services and hospitals.»
Barbro Longva, Head of Health and Care Services, Stad Municipality
Technology across service levels
In addition to the benefits for the local government sector, Longva believes that digital supervision and sleep monitoring can also deliver benefits across all levels of health and social care.
– Digital solutions can generate data that makes it easier and more efficient to achieve better collaboration between local health services and hospitals. This could help us avoid hospital admissions and reduce the number of patients who are in and out of hospital repeatedly. I believe that digital solutions and the data they can generate offer significant potential for improvement, says Longva.
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