Digital Infrastructure for Health Counselling
Navigating the healthcare system takes more than good advice.
Client: Stiftung Unabhängige Patientenberatung Deutschland | https://www.patientenberatung.de
Counselling is trust. The system has to keep up.
The Stiftung Unabhängige Patientenberatung Deutschland (Stiftung UPD) is one of Germany’s most important points of contact for people with legal, medical, or social insurance questions — anonymous, free of charge, and independent of health insurers, clinics, or pharmaceutical companies. Lawyers, physicians, and social insurance experts answer questions about patient rights, insurance, medical findings, and treatment errors. Currently around 50,000 times a year, almost exclusively by telephone.
The Stiftung UPD wants to change that. Regional counselling centres across Germany, new digital channels, up to 400,000 counselling contacts per year: that is the vision. To reach it, the foundation needs more than additional counsellors. It needs a digital infrastructure capable of matching that ambition. With the launch of the Counselling Cockpit, we delivered a system built precisely for that purpose.
Many systems. No connection.
Before the Counselling Cockpit, the Stiftung UPD team worked with a series of isolated individual solutions: dedicated telephony software, an external video counselling tool, Confluence as a knowledge base, Microsoft 365 as the central collaboration platform, and a separate HR system for personnel management. Each of these systems served its purpose. But none of them spoke to the others.
For counsellors, that meant daily switching between applications, manual data transfers, and duplicate documentation — time and energy taken away from where it matters most: the counselling itself. At the same time, pressure was mounting: more channels, more locations, more responsibility. But no system to hold that complexity together.
The solution: one cockpit instead of many separate controls
Factorial developed a Counselling Cockpit for Stiftung UPD — a central working platform that connects all systems relevant to counselling activity and makes them accessible through a single unified interface. In practice, that means counsellors open one application in the morning. Inside it, they find the master data for their counselling centre, the internal knowledge management system, their communications, and the documentation of completed sessions. No switching between programmes, no manual transfers, no duplicate data entry. The time previously lost between systems now belongs to the counselling.
The project launched in October 2025 with an intensive requirements and concept phase. Working closely with Stiftung UPD’s product management, processes were analysed, user needs captured, and a modular architecture defined that can grow alongside the organisation.
The technical foundation: Drupal as a stable, open-source backend; Vue.js as a modern frontend; a headless architecture with an API-first approach. This enables seamless integration of external systems — from Confluence for knowledge management to CTI telephony software and future video counselling solutions.
Particular care was given to data protection: the Counselling Cockpit stores and processes highly sensitive health data. Stiftung UPD does not treat data protection as an obstacle, but as a quality standard. The system was built according to the principle of Privacy by Design — with end-to-end encryption, a differentiated rights and roles concept, and full transparency in data processing. Accessibility in line with BITV is not an optional add-on, but part of the core.
Counselling Cockpit in numbers
99.9%
System availability
180 Counsellors
Concurrent use without performance loss
400,000 Contacts
Per year as the target, cockpit as the infrastructure
Live since early 2026 — and only just beginning
At the start of 2026, the Counselling Cockpit went live in production. The first milestone is complete: core infrastructure, master data management, Confluence integration, and secure user management are running. The system is designed for up to 180 simultaneous users at 99.9% availability.
With Stiftung UPD, Factorial now has its second counselling-focused intranet in active production. What began at TelefonSeelsorge as a platform for volunteer crisis support now proves its value in an entirely different context: as the backbone of a professional, publicly anchored health counselling service. Two different organisations, two different requirement profiles.
What follows is a clear roadmap: the integration of telephony software, written counselling channels, video counselling, and ultimately a full CRM. Each milestone extends the cockpit by another channel, another function, another group of people who can work with it.
The Counselling Cockpit is the first step. The goal is a future-proof digital infrastructure for quality-assured patient counselling in Germany — scalable, open, and built on the trust that Stiftung UPD has earned with the people it advises.
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