INAMI intends to develop an existing intercultural mediation service by videoconference and purchase support.

The project "Intercultural mediation via the Internet" aims to enable intercultural mediators to act as interpreters outside their database via a videoconference connection (in other hospitals, at the general practitioner's office, etc.).

The parties involved are:

RIZIV: technical expertise and purchaser of the service.

FPS Public Health: service manager, front-line support for users, service user.

Intercultural mediators of hospitals: service users, service planning.

Doctors and other hospital caregivers: users of the service

General practitioners, health care providers in the medical services of reception facilities for asylum seekers, front-line psychologists, care providers in Health Reception Points for Ukrainian refugees, mobile teams (cf. psychiatric reform): users of the service.

As part of this project, an application ("Intercult-App") was developed and integrates several components of Google Workspace (Google Calendar, Google Meet, Gmail, G-drive, Google Spreadsheet). It makes it possible to make an appointment in real time with an intercultural mediator and to initiate the interventions themselves. The application also includes a series of functions that allow system managers to track its use. Paid Google accounts (intercult.be accounts) are used for the whole.

However, the current application is not stable enough and is still too user-friendly in some respects. For these reasons, improvements need to be developed and implemented. In addition, care should be taken to ensure that the application is always adapted to new developments in the Google Workspace environment, in order to avoid changes causing interruptions in the service offered to caregivers. The current demand therefore concerns both the development of certain features such as "bug fixing" and the realization of interventions guaranteeing the operation of the application for the duration of the contract. These strategies should ensure that the application is easy to use and works properly, both on laptop and tablet (Android and IOS).

It is also a request for second-line support during business days and business hours. The functionalities and services must be guaranteed by means of an SLA (Service Level Agreement), and in case of errors, support must be provided in the second line by the successful bidder. The first line will be taken care of by employees of the FPS Public Health. Support requests to the second-line supplier may also be initiated by the NIHDI.

The successful bidder will make FAQs available to facilitate the front-line support work by the "service manager".

The service provider is obliged to protect the application from any problems, and must therefore ensure continuous monitoring of the application.

Ways to ensure trouble-free enforcement include:

1. Manage and monitor all aspects of the Google environment:

•Areas:

 Users, Domains, Apps, Organisational units, Buildings and resources, Billing, Alerts, Devices, Security, Directory sync, Data migration, Product updates, Groups, Account settings, Reports, Rules and Storage

2. Troubleshooting, researching and troubleshooting:

Problems are resolved in close collaboration and after agreement between the RIZIV and the FPS.

Problem solving can be both technical (bug fixing, coding) and functional (workarounds).

If the problem reported by the user to the FPS cannot be solved by the FPS, the latter will contact the contractor by phone or email during office hours (9am-5pm) to analyse the problem. The contractor will react within the hour. If necessary, the contractor will be asked to contact directly the users of the service (nursing staff, intercultural mediators, IT staff of the care institution).

3. Development of existing and new functionalities:

The service provider may be required to continue developing features.

This will be reported to the INAMI and the FPS at regular intervals.

Feature already defined:

The functionality below is for illustrative purposes only and is not exhaustive. During the duration of the project, additional functionalities can be defined.

• As a healthcare provider, I would like to be able to adjust the fields: 'additional information', 'name of care provider' and 'phone number' after making an appointment.

• As a mediator of first resort, I want to be able to forward my appointments to all mediators in the same target language so that one of them can make the appointment in my absence.

• As an administrator, I wish I could allow only a certain group of care providers to make (or request one) appointments with certain mediators.

• As a caregiver, I want to be able to track the status of my requests as "requested" (processed), "accepted" or "denied" under the "Requests" tab.

• As an administrator, I want to be able to see in the calendar (Google Calendar) mediators why they are not available so that the availability check takes place more easily and no valuable time is lost.

• As a mediator, I want to have an overview of my weekly availability and also be able to adjust it to be able to make myself (un)available at any time.

• As a care provider, I do not want to see the number of mediators for the language combination requested in the first step of "make an appointment" so that I can move faster to step 2 and make or request an appointment faster.

4. Purchase and tracking of licenses

The provider must ensure that the necessary licences are available to the contracting authority's partners.

The number is currently estimated at 800.