How Oteo is helping to develop patient hotels with Scalingo

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, and Temporary Non-Medicalized Accommodations (TNMA) are one of the major innovations in patient care.

French company Oteo specializes in helping healthcare establishments deploy the TNMA system, more commonly known as the patient hotels.

We recently had the opportunity to interview Elsa Kiefer, Oteo's co-founder, to discover how Oteo offers a complete solution that enables medical teams to refocus on their primary mission: care.

In this article, we invite you to immerse yourself in the heart of an innovative company. Find out what they do, and how Scalingo fits into their workflow!

Oteo makes the patient hotels system accessible

In 2022, Oteo will enter the e-health market to democratize the patient hotels system by providing healthcare establishments with the necessary support.

The aim is to provide greater flexibility for care teams, while offering greater comfort for patients.

We explain how!

What is the patient hotels system?

The patient hotels scheme was created following an experiment initiated by the French Government in 2017.

This experiment, which lasted 3 years and involved only a handful of establishments, led to the generalization of the scheme, making it open to any healthcare establishment wishing to set it up.

Since then, a legal framework has been in place, enabling patients who do not require overnight care to spend the night in a third-party facility.

Patient hotels are therefore temporary accommodations for patients whose condition allows them to leave hospitals at night, freeing up space and combating saturation.

They also help to streamline ward management and better manage available beds, by offering patients an alternative to full hospitalization.

But it also helps to combat medical deserts, especially as these patient hotels are particularly well suited to people who live more than an hour away from the place where they are treated.

What does Oteo offer?

Oteo is positioned as the turnkey solution for all patient accommodation in the making.

Their offer combines both a support service and a digital solution designed to simplify and digitize all administrative procedures.

The platform acts as an intermediary between accommodation providers and healthcare establishments, making the process more accessible.

Oteo is a dual-interface platform that meets the needs of healthcare establishments, accommodation providers and patients alike.

Through the tool, it will be possible to check the eligibility of patients according to the distance to the location or the reason for the appointment, for example.

This is also accompanied by a section reserved for reservation management, enabling users to modify or cancel stays according to availability.

Invoicing and reimbursement functionalities have also just been rolled out, making it possible to obtain the correct invoices directly from healthcare establishments, and to claim reimbursement afterwards.

From a technical point of view, Oteo is a monolithic application in Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL database, hosted on Scalingo.

Elsa explains that, for the moment, this architecture is sufficient for the needs of their users, but that it may evolve as the platform develops.

What does an HDS-certified PaaS bring to Oteo?

To understand why Oteo chose Scalingo's PaaS for their project, we put the question to Elsa.

Several points were mentioned, and we detail them right here!

HDS certification

Given the nature of Oteo's business, Elsa explained that the fundamental criterion for choosing a hosting provider is HDS certification.

HDS certification (Health Data Hosting) is a security and confidentiality standard specific to the healthcare sector in France, and must be acquired by all platforms wishing to host healthcare data.

In September 2022, Scalingo became the first French and European PaaS to be HDS and ISO 27001 certified!.

This certification is therefore crucial for Oteo, as all e-health players in France collecting healthcare data are legally required to use an HDS hosting provider.

In addition to HDS certification, Elsa confides in us the importance of data sovereignty for Oteo, which is a guarantee of trust towards their users and partners.

The French alternative to Heroku

Before using Scalingo, Elsa explained that she had used AWS and Heroku in the past.

During her experiments, she explained why Scalingo is an alternative to Heroku and that the PaaS model convinced her because of its simplicity of use and the benefits it offers.

This user experience combined with the other needs specific to Oteo's business make Scalingo the solution of choice for Elsa and her team.

Active support

Finally, one of the most important points for the Oteo team is to have access to a support service that is present and able to help them when needed.

This is all the more important for a business such as Oteo's, as the slightest technical problem can represent a major inconvenience for healthcare establishments and their patients.

Elsa explains that this element is part of the service she expects from her hosting provider, and that she finds it in our PaaS.

In a nutshell

Oteo offers a turnkey solution for all future non-medicalized temporary accommodations (TNMA).

This dual-interface tool enables healthcare establishments to easily develop and manage this new activity, enabling patients to sleep in more favorable conditions, and accommodations to safely welcome these new customers, all by offering a digital platform that centralizes responses to all needs.

For several months now, Oteo has been relying on Scalingo PaaS to host its application, and we were able to understand the key foundations of this partnership.

For Oteo, this involves a number of points, including :

• HDS certification on a French PaaS
• Ease of use and an alternative to Heroku
• The availability of an expert support team ready to help when needed

A great collaboration between Oteo and Scalingo, enabling many patients to be hosted in the best possible conditions for their care.

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