Charim Builds Reliable Data Foundation with TimeXtender

Data quality is important for every organisation. This is especially true in health care, where institutions deal with sensitive information and where efficiency is necessary. That is why Zorggroep Charim chose TimeXtender’s data management platform to bring data from various sources in a simple and secure manner together, as the foundation for reports and analyzes.

Zorggroep Charim has fifteen locations in the Veenendaal and Zeist regions. About 1,600 employees and 1,300 volunteers work daily to practice the name of Charim, Hebrew for “dedication”, for more than 1,000 clients. The care group offers care and services for the elderly, from welfare activities to hospice care.

Data Quality in Healthcare

Where data quality is important for every organisation, this is especially true in healthcare. Institutions deal with sensitive information and efficiency is extremely important. Employees must always have up-to-date and correct information in order to lead the organisation efficiently. At Zorggroep Charim, however, this information was contained in several systems: different financial packages, the HR system, the timetable package and a, due to constantly changing laws and regulations , highly dynamic care registration system.

The care group wanted to bring the data from all those sources together in a smart way. After all, each individual data source contains a lot of valuable information, but it is precisely the combination of data from the various systems that really provides new insights, for example in the field of productivity or incident reports.

A Solid, Secure Foundation
Building this “data foundation” had to meet a number of conditions. “The use of IT is very important to us, but we have to be smart with our resources,” says Arno Bos, financial controller at Charim. “We also wanted to be able to combine data internally, without having to hire consultants for every new need. Finally, data privacy plays an important role, our data quickly includes sensitive information. We were looking for a solution that fully describes the data flows, one of the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and where we could centrally control who has which access rights. Because our bar was set high, we chose to seek advice from ilionx, the IT partner we have been working with for years. They recommended that we look at TimeXtender®, a data management platform that allows us to access, model and manage our data with just one employee.”

BI manager Arnoud Mesken at ilionx explains this advice, “TimeXtender® offers a generic automation solution for the entire data processing in an organisation, from unlocking the resources to the presentation layer. The platform is particularly valuable for organizations that want to be self-reliant and do not want to spend too much money on BI specialists. TimeXtender® lets them do a better job of managing their data. They can now do this without external help, and can expand their data as needed. The tool is also very intuitive and can therefore be learned in a relatively short time.”

Implementation in a Day
The implementation of TimeXtender® did not take months or weeks, but days. Arnoud Mesken of ilionx explains: “The beauty of TimeXtender® is that the product can be initially implemented in just one day, after which you can link unlimited data sources. We initially chose to unlock the ECD and care administration system of Nedap Healtcare, followed by the financial management system Exact and the HR system Afas.”

In order to make the care group even more flexible, the switch to using Microsoft Power BI was also made in 2019. This package replaces Microsoft Reporting Services, a rather complex solution primarily intended for the creation of static reports, not for dynamic badges and analytics. All data sources that are unlocked via TimeXtender® automatically end up in Power BI, via TimeXtender®, with all reports being customizable. For example, Zorggroep Charim has the tools to quickly produce and deliver its own reports.

"TimeXtender® offers a generic automation soulution for the entire data processing in an organisation, from unlocking the resources to the presentation layer." - Arnoud Mesken, BI Manager ilionx.

User Friendly
And, is TimeXtender’s data management platform actually as user-friendly as stated? We ask Tessa van der Linden, BI employee at Zorggroep Charim: “Let me state first of all that I have no IT background. I am now responsible for setting up and maintaining the data warehouse up to and including building dashboards and reports. If you have to do that alone, TimeXtender® is a very easy solution. There are countless ways to retrieve the data in a very user-friendly way. The nice thing is that you don’t need to have as much detailed technical knowledge of the design of different packages. Otherwise you would have to seek outside help for that.”

Fast. Consistent. Up-to-Date
Thanks to TimeXtender®, all employees in the organisation have consistent,
up-to-date data to make better decisions more quickly, provided they have the rights to do so.

That is great, but Arno Bos of Zorggroep Charim sees even more possibilities. “I hope that in the future, for example, we can also provide doctors with data on the treatment of clients. We are unlocking everything that is finance related, but we are not yet really supporting daily processes. Everything is being registered, but with the right trends and analyses we will be able to get more out of it.”