Kristiansund Kommune: Transforming the Norwegian public sector through the cloud

“Everything we do aims to help our neighbours, our community and our families. Through digitalization, we’re delivering services that drive meaningful, immediate change – change that is saving lives and empowering our people for the better.”

Erik Ingebrigtsen, Head of Development and Digital Innovation at Kristiansund Kommune, is talking about the inspirational work the municipality does for its community and how technology is making it possible.

“We may be a small municipality, but we have big aspirations when it comes to doing right by our citizens” says Ingebrigtsen. “And we believe that technology is the best way to do it.”

As part of this vision, the organization has spent the past few years embracing the cloud to become more efficient and develop solutions designed to benefit the municipality and its inhabitants.

Powered by Microsoft, the move is helping Kristiansund Kommune to quickly and easily develop solutions even in the most critical circumstances.

“The past few years have been incredibly challenging for our community, who were significantly impacted by the pandemic,” says Ingebrigtsen.

“Thankfully, we’ve been able to weather this by being on the cloud and having such an important digital backbone to support us.”

From traditional town to tech innovator

Kristiansund Kommune is a small municipality in Norway with around 24,000 inhabitants and 2,000 employees. Based in the north-west of the country, the organization has long been dealing with various challenges, including a growing elderly population with increased health needs, climate change and declining mental health amongst young people during the height of COVID-19.

According to Arild Ovesen, Head of IT at Kristiansund Kommune, addressing these challenges has been particularly tough over the past few years – particularly due to the municipality’s long tradition of manual, paper-based processes and its reliance on an outdated IT infrastructure. 

“We have bold plans when it comes to finding solutions for the citizens of Kristiansund,” says Ovesen, the Head of IT at Kristiansund Kommune. “But for a long time, our IT Infrastructure was slowing us down, standing in the way of innovation.”

Things have changed significantly since 2018. Under new leadership, the Norwegian municipality has embraced a huge change, making a remarkable transition from outdated infrastructure to impactful technology driven by Microsoft.

“In recent years, we’ve felt the ever-increasing need to adopt and embrace a more hands-on model that would allow us to take greater ownership of our own services,” Ovesen continues. “Our goal has since been to find solutions that would make us feel more flexible and connected – and that would help give us a solid digital backbone.

“In 2018, we found the answer to all these needs in Microsoft Azure.”

Saving lives with cloud technology

Like the rest of the country, Kristiansund Kommune plunged into lockdown in March 2020, which suddenly created urgent need to protect those at risk and to prepare its healthcare services for a peak in cases.

“Those initial days were so chaotic,” says Ingebrigtsen. “We had people needing to book tests, a shortage of various personal protective equipment (PPE) and so much more. We needed to figure out a way to stay on-top of it all.”

Using Azure App Services, the organization managed to do just that. In a matter of weeks, the municipality was able to create ‘C19’, a cloud-based platform giving the organization greater control of everything happening within its healthcare services.   

From bookings tests for citizens to keeping track of oxygen levels within patients and overviewing vaccination status, the platform has proved crucial for Kristiansund Kommune – helping it to save  multiple lives and avoid more than ten respiratory treatments.

“These may sound like small numbers compared to other cities,” says Ingebrigtsen. “But considering that our population size is 24,000 people, the results were actually outstanding for us.”

Now more than a year since the end of lockdown, the platform continues to play a crucial role – with Kristiansund Kommune using it to both schedule vaccinations and provide citizens with an optimized patient journey.

“When the pandemic first hit us, we didn’t anticipate how many people would actually order a vaccine,” says Ovesen. “Thankfully, being on the cloud allowed us to be much more scalable and flexible – adjusting demand in an easy, quick way.

“And to make the experience even easier, we’re using a national identification gateway that allows our citizens to connect to our network no matter where they are or what device they use.”

Helping students address their mental health

Beyond the pandemic, Kristiansund Kommune has been using the cloud to improve lives for all its citizens, young and old alike.

In the education sector, it has been working to deliver a mental health service that encourages students to seek help from the school nurse even when remote.

“When the pandemic hit, there were a lot of children sitting at home and wanting to speak to their school nurse,” says Ingebrigtsen. “Demand grew so immensely that at one point some students had a seven-week waiting time, which ended up heavily impacting their mental health.

“To facilitate these meetings, we decided to create a Microsoft Teams app for students for private talks with their school nurse.”

Created using Azure App Services, Azure SQL DB and Logic Apps, the app was an immediate success, and was used by students within the first two days of its release.

“We made sure that the app was easy to use for both our students and the medical professionals they spoke to,” says Ingebrigtsen.

“We did this by allowing nurses to use Teams to automatically input notes, thus saving them time on their patient journal system.”

Using Microsoft tools to provide aid to those in need

Beyond education, Kristiansund Kommune has found uses for its cloud platform that are having huge cost-saving benefits for healthcare and leading to better patient experiences.

“In Norway, it is the municipality’s responsibility to provide some mobility aids for citizens,” explains Ingebrigtsen. “However, although this service is used every day, it’s very technologically primitive.

“Normally, at the end of a patient’s stay in a hospital, a doctor assigns mobility aids to them,” he continues. “However, sometimes the aid is not in stock and so the patient might have to wait, sometimes even resulting in a longer hospital stay. This is very costly for the healthcare sector and a bad experience for the patient.”

Moreover, if the municipality is unable to provide an aid for a patient, they can incur financial penalties in the form of fines.

So, Kristiansund Kommune created a portal using Microsoft Azure to digitalize the process and improve the service. By using symptoms and other factors to predict what aids patients might need before they are ready to leave, and checking that the correct stock is available, the organization can either reserve aids in stock or order new ones. This reduces patients’ time spent in hospital and allows the municipality to make considerable cost savings.

It is something that is attracting the attention of other municipalities keen to reduce costs across Norway.

“We’re now expanding this service using AI and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to predict what mobility aids are needed,” says Ingebrigtsen. “This is attracting attention even beyond our city; we have mounting interest all over Norwegian municipalities for it.”

Data-driven decisions promise a better future

Looking to the future, Kristiansund Kommune has big and inspiring ideas for the potential of AI to help its citizens.

“We believe that the future of our municipality lies in combining data with transformative technologies like AI,” says Ovesen. “This allows us to make much more informed decisions on priorities and services – all while keeping a peace of mind thanks to our zero-trust approach and the security that Azure comes with.”

Kristiansund Kommune plans to expand these technologies beyond Kristiansund’s boundaries and offer them to other municipalities both within Norway and abroad.

“We’ve seen a lot of admiration for the work we do for our citizens from other government bodies,” Says Ingebrigtsen. “So, we have a lot of hope for the future of this software.”

Though the organization is only at the beginning of its digital transformation, it has high hopes and expectations for the future of its projects. More so than that, the municipality believes that this new technology will truly improve the lives of its citizens.

“Our citizens are beyond satisfied with our services, particularly because we go the extra mile in helping them and supporting them,” concludes Ingebrigtsen. “All of this is helping us to drive cultural change in our society.

“This is really what’s making us so proud about this project: using technology, we’re able to drive meaningful change that allows our community to thrive.”