Customer stories

Medical Research Data Management (MRDM)

Medical Research Data Management advances healthcare with OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting. The solution provides flexible analytics dashboards to every Dutch hospital and thousands of clinicians

Challenges

  • Increasing volumes of data require greater automation and performance
  • Drive to deliver greater user flexibility and control via dashboards, with drill-down capability
  • Need to balance cost with functionality

Results

  • Efficient, cost-effective and scalable data analytics and presentation solution

  • Dashboard, visualization and personalization for benchmarking purposes that help raise healthcare standards

  • Ability to connect clinical, financial and patient outcome data for holistic value-based healthcare

Story

MRDM’s services allow its users, under strict data privacy regulations, to compare their performance and patient experiences and outcomes across hospitals and clinicians. For colon cancer surgical procedures, for example, MRDM tracks more than 100 items in each of the Netherland’s 90 hospitals for quality measurement. This registry is subject to agreed upon inclusion criteria and results in numerical indicators of effectiveness. These indicators can be compared with other clinicians and hospitals, allowing individuals to measure their performance against their peers and identify areas for improvement. When the hospital authorizes these indicators to be sent to insurance companies, they can use the data when selecting where and from whom to buy medical services. The Dutch government also uses the service for reporting and analysis.

Medical professional working at their desktop.

OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting is a strong enabler for quality, and yet it is extremely efficient and cost-effective. With just a small centralized team, we can very efficiently connect clinical, financial and patient outcome data, providing holistic analysis to help value-based health care transformation.

Wim Smit
Founder and CEO, Medical Research Data Management

MRDM has helped transform healthcare through its data collections, analysis and reporting services for more than four years. It is continually helping healthcare professionals deliver value-based healthcare, using combined clinical, financial and patient outcome measurement data. Furthermore, MRDM publishes analysis through the Dutch Institute for Clinical Auditing (DICA).

When MRDM began, it used open source BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tool) to provide analytical reporting of hospital data to its users. As the complexity, volume and sophistication of the services evolved, so did the functional and technical requirements.

Wim Smit, CEO and founder at MRDM, explains the evolution further. “Since we began in 2012, our vision has been to continually advance the services we provide with the aim of improving healthcare and its evolution to value-based healthcare. As adoption of the services grew, it became apparent that we would need a more robust, faster and more flexible business intelligence solution to achieve this.”

Greater functionality, flexibility and scalability

MRDM needed a solution capable of providing an intuitive, online dashboard, suitable for scaling up. However, many commercial solutions were either lacking functionality or their pricing structure was an impediment.

“We decided to replace our existing BIRT implementation with OpenText™ Magellan™ BI & Reporting. Not only does it provide the functionality, performance and scalability that we need, but the economics make sense too, with an unlimited number of end users,” said Smit.

To date, more than 5,000 users regularly access Magellan BI & Reporting to review their performance and make comparisons with their peers. They quickly become familiar with the interface, accessing detailed analytics through their dashboard. The solution allows them to drill down to the details behind high-level metrics, helping them understand where they can improve.

Rapid implementation and knowledge transfer

While MRDM had built up knowledge of BIRT, it turned to OpenText partner, ReportSoft, to help rapidly deploy the Magellan BI & Reporting solution.

“We worked closely with ReportSoft who provided valuable assistance to help us deploy the first reports quickly. With their expertise, the implementation was technically straightforward, and we swiftly moved to automate and scale up the solution to user dashboards and personalization,” Smit said.

MRDM is now largely self-sufficient thanks to the knowledge transfer from ReportSoft and now brings in data from a growing number of sources, providing greater depth to the business intelligence it provides. It established a reusable framework to use as more areas for analysis are identified.

A single sign-on (SSO) means end users do not have to authenticate separately for the OpenText-based portal. Customization provides a controlled set of personalization for users, while maintaining the easy-to-use and intuitive interface.

“Committees of medical specialists under guidance of DICA, design the calculations required to analyze the raw data. Using Magellan BI & Reporting, we then transform their requirements into reports and visualizations that are refreshed every week. Clinicians and hospitals can each track progress as often as they wish, knowing they are looking at the very latest data,” Smit said.

Magellan BI & Reporting allows MRDM to control who sees what. Hospitals can review the analysis and approve them for publication, allowing them to identify any inaccurate data. After that, MRDM manages publication and access to insurance companies, government and patient organizations.

Contributing to healthcare improvements

By having ready access to this analytical intelligence, clinicians have been able to identify areas that are working well and areas that need further consideration. They can then apply appropriate improvements where necessary. For example, using the solution has helped reduce complications after colon cancer surgeries by more than half over four years.

“Magellan BI & Reporting is a strong enabler for quality and yet it is extremely efficient and cost-effective. With just a small centralized team, we can very efficiently connect clinical, financial and patient outcome data, providing holistic analysis to help advance healthcare provision,” Smit explained.

With all hospitals in the Netherlands now using the solution, more clinical areas are being planned for inclusion, as is the greater linking of clinical, financial and patient outcome data to further facilitate the provision of value-based healthcare.

“We are gathering pace as we expand not only within the Netherlands, but also in the Nordics. We opened an office in Stockholm, Sweden. We receive a lot of interest from other countries too, including Australia, France and South Africa. With Magellan BI & Reporting, we have the opportunity to expand our solution globally,” Smit says.

The full scope of possibilities Magellan BI & Reporting provides is only just becoming apparent. Other areas, such as decision support where patients and clinicians can choose the optimal treatment together, is an exciting use case for MRDM.

About ReportSoft

ReportSoft is the OpenText™ Analytics and Reporting partner for Benelux and Scandinavia. As part of their service they offer installation, training, support and implementation—both for big data analytics and the OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting analytics and visualization platform. ReportSoft has over a decade of experience spanning multiple industries serving many customers out of their offices in Copenhagen and Den Hague.

About Medical Research Data Management (MRDM)

Medical Research Data Management (MRDM), based in Deventer, Netherlands, was founded in 2012 as a spinoff from Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC). MRDM provides data collection, management, reporting, and decision support to healthcare providers, all Dutch hospitals, government, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies throughout the Netherlands.