Amstelring creates knowledge-driven healthcare with Tableau Cloud

Amstelring is a professional healthcare organisation based in the Netherlands that specialises in the field of elderly care, nursing and treatment. With dozens of residential care centres and small-scale group homes based in the Netherlands within Amsterdam and surrounding cities, Amstelring enables the elderly and chronically ill to live with complex care needs while still remaining independent as much as possible. Amstelring offers specialist care such as: dementia care, stroke rehabilitation, transfer care at the VUmc, palliative care, care for Huntington's disease and acquired brain injury and mental healthcare.

With this range of specialist care, Amstelring takes pride in offering the best quality of care not only for their clients but their employees too. Leveraging data therefore plays a crucial role in the day-to-day running of the business, particularly when supporting client independence and at the same time protecting their safety should immediate care be required.

Becoming a data driven organisation which aims to fully capitalise on data requires the right tools and processes to turn raw data into immediate and actionable insights. Milou Homan, data analyst at Amstelring, shares the importance of data analytics for both clients and employees at Amstelring, and how Tableau is supporting their data visualisation needs with their implementation partner Infotopics.

Two years prior to Amstelring using Tableau, data analytics systems were outsourced and heavily manual which meant that large amounts of data insights were overlooked and not being leveraged. Client safety alerts, like room motion sensors and client pendant alarms would go off regularly, but without the means to analyse this data, clients and staff were becoming overwhelmed.

“Each alarm indicated that a client needed immediate attention when in fact they didn’t. Therefore they would then rush to the attention of the client and enter their room which would cause disruption and confusion,” says Milou. “We didn’t have the means to understand the data on why these alarms were happening so regularly which was impacting client and employee experience due to unneeded disruption.”

It immediately became clear that a comprehensive data analytics platform was needed to centralise data from various silos across the organisation and create a single source of truth, for example to identify patterns of behaviour from clients triggering alarms and uncover other inefficiencies across the organisation.

“We needed a platform that could help analyse the data and use the data to indicate if clients really required urgent help and attention. Knowing this would help to improve client care and also reduce the workload of our employees” explains Milou. “Our carers have so much work to do and if we made this right it would free up time for a more relaxed way of working”.

Amstelring is using Tableau to train their staff, reprogram their systems and visualise what is happening. By combining data and practical knowledge, they can ensure that clients are provided with alarms that best fit their individual needs. This has also reduced the volume of alarms, as sensors that didn’t serve the right purpose were removed. The total number of notifications has been reduced by 50%. 

“Without these unnecessary interruptions, employees can better focus on the client they are attending to, and clients do not feel like the employee is needed elsewhere,” says Milou. “It is a big win for everyone.

With Tableau, Amstelring has also transformed the way it maintains client healthcare information which is critical to ensuring that clients are always receiving the best quality of care possible. Previously, employees would be required to manually check records every 6 months to ensure client information was reviewed and up-to-date. However, given the number of clients residing in Amstelring care homes, employees would have to randomly select a sample of files to run through in detail and check if any information was missing and that healthcare plans were fully completed - this was heavily manual and subject to human error.

Now, the status of all client healthcare plans can be visible in one place. “We have a quality of care dashboard that displays multiple data points to ensure that we have everything in the right place and flags anything missing so that processes are done more accurately and effectively” said Milou. “It’s so great that we can now see everything in one place with up-to-date insight into our quality of care at Amstelring with an overview of daily care for our clients. Historically this would take so much time but now it’s as simple as filter and click and you will see any client files that need updating or have missing information. It’s easy to use and directs employees to the right file to take action if needed” Milou also added.

This Tableau quality care dashboard can be created centrally and widely shared with employees across care homes, as it would only flag the application ID along with the incorrect or missing data. This notified care homes quickly which sped up the healthcare plan review process and avoided any confidential information being shared with employees who were not authorised to view the  client's personal details

Since implementing Tableau toward the end of 2019 alongside partner Infotopics, Amstelring has already seen the benefits of truly leveraging data and as a result, a powerful new data-driven culture is starting to form at all levels of the organisation.

“What excites me is that after these projects we now have people across the organisation asking us ‘when can it be my turn to use data,” says Milou. With support from training provided from Infotopics “we’re now able to empower other people within the organisation to use Tableau. The benefit is that it builds excitement, they don’t need to wait for us and they can now freely use Tableau to create the insights they need to be successful.”

Amstelring has only scratched the surface and as Milou concludes “we would love to combine more data and analyse more trends to improve our overall quality of client care and just as importantly reduce the workload of our employees to improve their wellbeing and empower them to make data driven decisions.”. Infotopics and Tableau are central to this change and with the Tableau platform and Infotopics’ implementation strategy and training, Amstelring will continue to accelerate their knowledge-driven healthcare and improve the lives and well-being of so many to come.