How does a data platform contribute to better care, improved patient experiences and more efficient healthcare work, within your organization and within the chain? And how does it ensure that you, as a healthcare institution, are ready for the future, even though you don’t know 100% what it will look like? ZorgSaam knows, because they built a powerful data platform that forms the foundation for groundbreaking healthcare innovations.

With a data platform on Microsoft Azure, ZorgSaam can work on data-driven decision-making, user-friendly access to information and other data applications for future-proof care, without technical barriers.

The ZorgSaam Zorggroep Zeeuws-Vlaanderen offers high-quality care to the local community in a region with unique challenges in that area. Many locations are needed to keep healthcare accessible to everyone. But the area is sparsely populated, meaning the locations do not have enough patients and clients. For this reason, ZorgSaam not only offers hospital care, but also community care and elderly care. Collaboration and smart combinations are therefore anchored in the mentality of the organization. Compared to the rest of the country, Zeeland also suffers greatly from an aging population. Both the population and the healthcare staff are relatively old in this region. A lot of care is therefore needed, while the workforce is shrinking rather than growing.

“Older people do physically demanding work,” says Peter van den Berg, CIO of ZorgSaam. “Some locations therefore have a disease rate of more than 10%, while they were already understaffed. So there’s no point in trying to do a little better. If you are a caterpillar, you must turn into a butterfly. Really transform, don’t become a faster caterpillar.”

So healthcare itself had to change. ZorgSaam had already gone a long way in organizing collaboration between different types of care, but this needed to be even more intensive and innovative. Working data-driven, giving patients more care at home and supporting all this with digital technology.

To achieve this, ZorgSaam needed a platform for innovation and data exchange.

Don’t exchange, but share

Van den Berg: “When the minister talks about data exchange, my hair stands on end. Simply make the data available that is needed at that moment from your platform. And that is the philosophy we apply at ZorgSaam: every employee, every specialist, but also every patient must have the data needed to make the right decisions and demonstrate the right behavior.”

Moreover, data is only part of the story, Van Den Berg believes: “You not only have to be data-centric, but also user-centric. Because what do you want as a healthcare institution? Healthy people. That won’t work if you only focus on data. How do you bring that data to the people? How can they use this to learn and better monitor their health? For this you need user-friendly access to data. But of course that is only possible if you have good data.”

Data can help to drastically improve a patient’s experience, for example by supporting the doctor during conversations. Van den Berg: “If someone comes to the specialist nervous, you have to deal with such a person in a different way than if you tell someone that he can go home or that he is healthy. We are not good at that in healthcare. We look at symptoms, make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment. With data you have the opportunity to get a complete picture, where the system looks at averages and says: you could make these diagnoses based on the data. The doctor or nurse can then ask: does this apply to this person? Or is there something else going on?”

It is a clear, but also progressive vision on data for healthcare. It even seems that Zeeland is out-innovating the rest of the country, forced by circumstances.

Van den Berg laughs: “We do our best.”

A data platform for innovation in healthcare

To make ZorgSaam’s vision a reality, the data first had to be freed from the source systems. The hospital developed a data strategy for this purpose. And it was precisely that strategy that attracted data specialist Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team since 2022. Provoost joined the team when ZorgSaam, Rapid Circle and E-mergo were ready to make that data strategy operational.

Rapid Circle was already a partner of ZorgSaam and worked with the hospital on the implementation of Teams and modern workplaces. E-mergo joined in because specific data expertise and tooling were needed for this project. Their experience with TimeXtender played a leading role in the project plan. This tool ensured that this did not become a long-term, risky IT project. ZorgSaam wanted to move forward quickly and innovate step by step and there was no support within the organization for long, complex processes. With TimeXtender we were able to connect data sources very quickly in a low-code environment and thus make the data immediately usable.

We aimed purely at operational applications. Ways to make data immediately useful in the healthcare process. So not on strategic information provision, BI or finance. These are also important, but the real challenges lie in healthcare itself.

Better processes, data-driven management and performance management

The first use case was a new ‘Integral Capacity Planning’: a set of dashboards for the occupancy of beds and operating rooms. These dashboards replaced an older system with the same function. “We were actually the first to build something that was already there,” says Provoost. “Only now can we manage the data pipeline much better, from source to visibility in dashboards. And, most importantly, we can now add new use cases very quickly. What we currently do for beds and operating rooms, we can also do for outpatient clinics. That is technically no longer a problem.”

Thanks to these dashboards, ZorgSaam has insight into bed occupancy, expected admissions and patients being discharged. And therefore also possible capacity problems in a department. The dashboards also support performance management: by providing insight into which processes are running well and where there are further optimization opportunities, they reduce the workload for healthcare providers.

Better information, better care

Healthcare and patients have also improved. A second use case was for a surgeon who primarily treats breast cancer patients. “Her patients regularly complete questionnaires,” says Provoost. “But in HiX, our EPD, it is difficult to view 2 questionnaires side by side. We extract that data from HiX with TimeXtender and visualize it with PowerBI. We send those visualizations back to HiX. This gives the surgeon a visual representation of the answers at different times in the patient file. One of the questions is ‘Are you in a lot of pain?’ If you see the score on such a question go down, you know that you are doing well with that indicator. This allows a doctor to conduct conversations more efficiently. No report, no Excel, no manual work.”

Doctors talk to each other about these applications. In this way, the organization is also learning to work more and more data-driven. The result: other doctors inform Provoost whether this is also possible with their questionnaires. And it is possible. Thanks to the data platform.

Ready for Wegiz, independent of suppliers

With all data available and usable on a secure platform, ZorgSaam has an advantage in future developments. Such as the arrival of Wegiz, the Data Exchange in Healthcare Act. The platform also makes them less dependent on their suppliers for data functionality. Provoost: “The approach is that we should be able to do it ourselves. Because HiX, Nedap and AFAS have their own roadmap. It does not necessarily correspond to what we want.”

In general, these are the most important results for ZorgSaam as an organization:

• Working with data has become intuitive. This allows people without much technical knowledge to quickly create a great application. The first successes inspire others to come up with ideas too. In this way, data-driven working is spreading like wildfire throughout the organization.
• Use cases are live much faster and therefore quickly deliver value in the operational process. This is mainly because data from different sources are now in one place and can therefore be quickly combined.
• The ‘Excel landscape’ is disappearing. There is now a single source of truth. “You can choose which data you use for each use case,” says Provoost. “But ultimately everyone is talking about the same data. That puts an end to a lot of discussions.”
• The data platform ensures monitoring of the data and complete data lineage. Does the team notice that something is wrong with the data? Then you can immediately see where the deviation comes from.
• Cost savings, because the purchase of point solutions and links that facilitate one specific data application is no longer necessary.
• Safe and controlled sharing of data with external organizations has become much easier.

Real-time dashboards, AI, RPA, sensors: ZorgSaam looks ahead

Accessing data from the core systems of a healthcare institution is not an easy job. Especially because security, privacy and compliance have the highest priority. But ZorgSaam has now come a long way with this and can quickly respond to questions from the organization. The next step is new quality dashboards.

“We first did this ourselves,” says Provoost. “We exported data from HiX to Excel using a report generator and combined it with data from other source systems, such as Zenya. Reports thus became available once a month. We are now going to integrate this into TimeXtender, so that we can refresh data at any time and give the dashboards a more real-time character.”

Other future options on the agenda for ZorgSaam include predicting bed occupancy with AI from Azure, using RPA to reduce administrative burdens and improving regional collaboration by connecting the data platform to data platforms of other healthcare institutions.

But the possibilities are now also endless in the areas of regional cooperation, wearables, the use of sensor data for preventive care and providing care at home instead of in the hospital.

The future of healthcare has begun in Zeeland.

Event: “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare“

In addition to this series of articles, we are organizing, together with Microsoft, the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare.”

Experts and experienced experts will tell you during this event:

• How to take the first step towards a cloud platform as a basis for healthcare innovation and regional cooperation
• How cloud technology and data will shape the future of healthcare, for example by facilitating the move from curative to preventive
• How data exchange radically improves chain care
• How a digital workplace frees healthcare providers from time-consuming manual work and makes their work more pleasant and efficient
• How a modern workplace contributes to retaining and attracting healthcare professionals
• How to break free from the limitations of your EPD and organize your care process the way it works for you
• The vision of other healthcare organizations on the future of healthcare

Register now and don’t miss it

Complete the form below and you will attend the event “The influence of technology on the future of healthcare” on April 18.

Other articles in this series: 

Prepare your healthcare institution for the future, even if you don’t know exactly what it will look like

As a healthcare institution, you want to offer your clients a long and happy life. To achieve this, now and in the future, you have to overcome major challenges. Because you have too few people and the number of people who want to work in healthcare is decreasing rather than increasing. Clients also need more care, are getting older and are living at home more often and longer. But of course you know all that. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

Better chain care with the cloud

Improving collaboration with chain partners is a common goal in many places. And working together means more than ‘knowing each other’s contact and calling in emergencies’. Most institutions and healthcare regions know this well. And across the Netherlands, healthcare professionals, administrators and IT professionals are looking for ways to make things work better. More and more healthcare institutions are realising that they cannot do this alone and need to share data with chain partners. Because your healthcare institution is often just one link in the chain. On a platform of freed data you can create care that is less laborious, but more effective.

How to be an appealing employer for home care workers in 2024

As a healthcare institution, you want to organise your work well and be an attractive employer. A modern digital workplace keeps a lot of frustration and unnecessary manual work away from your people. He is also an essential link in all digital work processes and in making data accessible.

Automate and support processes, also outside the ECD

You cannot support every care process in your ECD. Healthcare institutions that have tried to do this for years are now left with a system that is difficult to maintain that does not cooperate with other systems and chain partners. Low code solutions such as Microsoft Power Platform can be a solution. There are also many processes in healthcare that are not yet digitally supported, such as preventive monitoring of clients or calling for help from a colleague. There is still a world to be gained with smart automation in these ‘unstructured processes’.

Improve communication between your professionals

Situations develop quickly in healthcare. When the phone rings, or a client uses an emergency button, it is not always immediately clear what is going on. A cloud platform can combine telephony with other forms of communication and enrich the conversation in a secure way with data that fits the context. This way everyone knows what is going on and what the next action should be.