Crafting the digital evolution of healthcare and welfare
In June 2023, the merger of "Agentschap Zorg" and "Departement Welzijn, Volksgezondheid en Gezin" created Departement Zorg, a Flemish body helping citizens thrive in a caring society.
The merger brought a challenge, uniting a fragmented ecosystem, and an opportunity: a unified experience linking healthcare and welfare.
Since 2023, Craftzing helped turn that vision into strategy and working solutions, most visibly through Alivia, a platform for collaborative care.
The challenge: avoiding care gets lost between too many hands
People with long-term, intensive or complex care needs rarely rely on a single caregiver. They often depend on a network of different caregivers, ranging from professional healthcare providers and welfare organisations to informal caregivers such as family and friends.
To make sure the patient really feels taken care of by that network as a whole, communication and collaboration between all different caregivers is essential. Yet, it’s precisely in that area that things often go sideways.
As Eline De Block, Business Architect and Service Designer at Craftzing, put it, the real question underneath is how to make sure people get the right care at the right time throughout their entire patient journey, not just at isolated touchpoints along the way.
The solution: Alivia: the platform that unites an entire care team
To address this issue, Departement Zorg of the Government of Flanders developed Alivia, a collaborative platform that unites individuals with care needs, professional caregivers, and informal caregivers into one cohesive care team. Through Alivia, these groups can work together to create an integrated, goal-oriented care and support plan. By placing the individual and their needs at the center, Alivia enables more efficient and transparent collaboration and communication within the care team.
Alivia has since evolved into a more intuitive platform through ongoing user research and prototype validation, and it brings professional and informal caregivers closer together in a way the old fragmented system never allowed.
The approach: full-service partner inside a multi-party project
Craftzing's role in Alivia started off with strategy, but went far beyond “giving advice”. As Alivia is designed to create lasting change in the healthcare system, this project requires ongoing adjustments and change management. Hence, Craftzing contributes expertise in user research, service design, conceptualization, UX design, and accessibility to help support this long-term transformation.
During the first and second phase, two blended product teams worked seamlessly alongside Departement Zorg's own staff and external partners including Digitaal Vlaanderen, KPMG and DXC Cegeka, translating policy into actionable, human-centric digital initiatives from the very start.
Zooming in on Alivia's first version, the teams focussed primarily on usability and accessibility, since the platform had to work not only for healthcare professionals but for informal caregivers and people with care needs managing their own care directly. Regular quality checks in close collaboration with DXC Cegeka kept that accessibility bar high as the platform evolved.
For Alivia 2.0, Craftzing and Departement Zorg went deeper, working with KPMG to strengthen the platform's foundation through monthly feedback sessions, surveys and focus groups with pilot users, paired with research into established goal-oriented care methods. That work refined the concept into new guiding principles and prototypes, which Craftzing's design team then translated into detailed UX screens and functional requirements, before DXC Cegeka took those screens into UI design on top of the Flemish government's existing design system.
Craftzing's accessibility expert reviewed the near-final UI against relevant accessibility standards, and Craftzing guided DXC Cegeka's UI designers and development team through implementation to keep the transition from concept to live platform smooth and consistent.
Craftzing gave us the expertise and confidence needed to make Alivia truly inclusive and accessible. Through co-creation with end users and Craftzing's guidance, we were able to create an intuitive and accessible user interface.
