Municipalities have already invested in digital locks – they should not have to start over

Norwegian municipalities continue to invest in welfare technology. Yet new systems can force working solutions to be replaced or tie the municipality to one vendor. Aprire aims to challenge that with the new version of DigitalKey.

More older people should be able to live at home for longer, while municipalities must deliver health and care services with limited staff resources. This leaves a basic operational question: How does the right employee gain access to the right home without extensive physical-key administration or dependency on one lock vendor?

Municipalities have already invested significant resources in digitalisation. They should not have to discard working technology or start over whenever they choose a new solution. They should be able to build on what they already have while remaining free to choose differently in the future.

– Frank Svendsen, Aprire

From key rings to access management

DigitalKey 2.0 enables Aprire to bring the administration of digital access together across different lock solutions. For home-care services, the primary value lies in the workflow.

The municipality can control who should access which home, when access should apply and how it should be followed up. If a schedule changes or another employee takes over a visit, access can follow the service need instead of a physical key.

Municipalities can also reuse compatible digital locks that are already installed and add new solutions over time.

Challenging vendor lock-in

Open standards and APIs, secure access and traceability are important DigitalKey principles. The aim is to let municipalities retain control of their technology choices and support solutions residents may already have selected for their homes.

Technology should adapt to the service, not the other way around. If a municipality has hundreds of working digital locks, a new system decision should not mean replacing them. A decision made today should not determine which vendors can be chosen five years from now.

– Frank Svendsen, Aprire

Residents live in different types of homes with different doors, locks and technical solutions. The goal is therefore not to make every door identical, but to make the differences easier to manage.

Digital access as service infrastructure

DigitalKey builds on experience from digital access in Norwegian municipal services and has been developed in close cooperation with municipalities and welfare-solution providers.

Aprire’s ambition is for access to the home to become a natural part of the infrastructure around digital home care, alongside the systems used to plan and deliver services.

The interesting part is not simply that a door can be opened digitally. Value is created when the right employee receives the right access when the service is delivered, the workflow improves and the municipality remains free to choose the solutions it wants to use.

– Frank Svendsen, Aprire

About Aprire DigitalKey

Voglio and the Aprire team develop DigitalKey, a Norwegian platform for administering digital access. It enables different digital locks to be managed through one service.

The platform is built around open standards and APIs so municipalities and other organisations can reuse existing investments, reduce vendor dependency and choose new solutions as their needs change.