Summary

ZorgSaam, a healthcare organisation in the sparsely populated Zeeland region in The Netherlands, is using data as the driving force for healthcare innovation for their population. ZorgSaam faces unique challenges such as an aging population, a shrinking workforce and scattered locations. To provide better care, improved patient experiences and more efficient healthcare work, ZorgSaam is building a powerful data platform on Microsoft Azure.

The data platform enables ZorgSaam to make data-driven decisions, access information easily and develop data applications for future-oriented care, without technical obstacles. ZorgSaam is also transforming the way it delivers care, by offering more community care and elderly care, collaborating across different types of care and supporting patients at home with digital technology. A caterpillar turning into a butterfly, ZorgSaam is ready to transform and face the unknown future of healthcare.

Challenge

The ZorgSaam Zorggroep Zeeuws-Vlaanderen provides high-quality care to the local community in a region with unique challenges. To keep healthcare available to everyone, many locations are necessary. However, the area is sparsely populated, so the locations lack sufficient patients to be viable. That’s why ZorgSaam offers not only hospital care, but also community care and elderly care. Cooperation and smart combinations are part of the mindset of the organisation.

Compared to the rest of the country, Zeeland is also aging fast. Both the population and the healthcare staff are relatively old in this region. A lot of care is needed, while the workforce is decreasing instead of increasing.

“Our older healthcare staff are doing physically demanding work, some locations therefore have a sick leave rate of more than 10%, while they were already understaffed. So, there’s no point in trying to do a little better, we need to transform. If you are a caterpillar, you must turn into a butterfly. Really transform, not become a faster caterpillar.”

– Peter van den Berg, CIO of ZorgSaam.

 So healthcare itself had to change. ZorgSaam had already gone a long way in organising collaboration between different types of care, but the next step 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.

“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 behaviour.”

– Peter van den Berg, CIO of ZorgSaam

Data is only part of the story, the other part is humans:

“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?”

– Peter van den Berg, CIO of ZorgSaam

Solution

“User-friendly access to data is the answer. But of course, that is only possible if you have good data.”

– Peter van den Berg, CIO of ZorgSaam

 Data can help to drastically improve a patient’s experience, for example by supporting the doctor during conversations.

 “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?”

– Peter van den Berg, CIO of ZorgSaam

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

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 organisation 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.”

– Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team

Result

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. 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.”

– Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team

Thanks to these dashboards, ZorgSaam has insight into bed occupancy, expected admissions and patients being discharged. 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 optimisation opportunities, they reduce the workload for healthcare providers.

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, 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 visualisations 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.”

– Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team

Doctors talk to each other about these applications. In this way, the organisation 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. 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.

“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.”

– Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team

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

• 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 organisation.
• Use cases go 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 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 organisations has become much easier.
• The ‘Excel landscape’ is disappearing. There is now a single source of truth.

“You can choose which data you use for each use case, but ultimately everyone is talking about the same data. That puts an end to a lot of discussions.”

– Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team

What’s Next

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 organisation. The next step is new quality dashboards.

“We first did this ourselves! 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.”

– Michel Provoost, leader of ZorgSaam’s Data Ops team

 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 field 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.

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