AllStack
Healthcare

The “Gesprekshulp” Dashboard for Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital

With a brain tumor diagnosis, everything suddenly revolves around scans, test results and treatment plans. Personal things, like staying at work or caring for the kids, fade into the background. Clinicians mostly saw the medical story, not what mattered to the patient. That’s why AllStack built Gesprekshulp, together with the Neurosurgery research group at Elisabeth-TweeSteden Hospital (ETZ) and the creators of the Goings-On app.

Gesprekshulp is a dashboard integrated into the EHR (Epic). It shows what patients fill in daily in the Goings-On app: goals, symptoms and test scores, as graphs instead of numbers, directly for the clinician. That way they see at a glance what matters for this particular patient.

And now? It’s running in the clinic at ETZ, and we’re rolling it out to three other major hospitals.

Neurochirurgie afdeling ETZ
The challenge: from raw data to clinical value

Through the Goings-On app, patients with a brain tumor track how they’re doing every day: their goals (such as staying at work or playing football with the kids) and their symptoms (such as fatigue or headaches), each on a scale of 1 to 5. Simple for the patient, filled in within a minute from the couch.

The challenge: getting this data to the clinician. That had to happen in a safe, intuitive way, without disrupting the workflow or extending consult time.

Three hard requirements for the solution:

  1. Integrated into the workflow. No separate system, no separate login: it must work directly from the existing EHR.
  2. Privacy-sensitive. Must be pseudonymized and stored encrypted (GDPR / NEN 7510).
  3. Time-efficient. Clinicians have minimal time during a consult, so the dashboard must show trends and deviations immediately.
Our solution: ‘Gesprekshulp’

Before Gesprekshulp, the clinician didn’t have this overview. That information, if it came up at all, had to surface during the consult itself. Now the clinician opens the dashboard with one click from Epic: goals, symptom trends and test scores directly in view, no extra logins, no extra steps.

1. Runs on SMART on FHIR

One click on the button in Epic and the clinician is logged in via OAuth2/SSO, with the right patient data already loaded. No extra systems, no extra passwords.

2. Graphs, not tables

Smooth, interactive graphs over an adjustable period (one week to three months): symptoms such as fatigue, sleep quality and mood swings alongside personal goals, including photos the patient added themselves. The clinician immediately sees what matters personally to this patient, and can steer the conversation accordingly.

3. Privacy by design

Data is encrypted and pseudonymized before it leaves the app, not traceable to an individual. Every action is logged for full traceability.

The result
4x more attention to what matters to the patient

Clinicians discussed personal goals almost four times more often: 2.8 per consult, versus 0.6 without Gesprekshulp.

No extra consult time

The average consult duration stayed exactly the same, even with Gesprekshulp in place.

From research to daily care

What started as research into whether patient goals added value in the consultation room now runs structurally as part of daily care at ETZ.

Rollout to other hospitals

Following the success at ETZ, three other hospitals in the Netherlands are now following.

Sam Werring
Sam Werring Guided this project from start to finish

Questions about this project or the technical approach? I’m happy to tell you more.

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References & scientific context
  • Goings-On & ETZ: More about the Goings-On app, the research and the background of this project can be found on the ETZ website.
  • Research & publications: The project is part of the ZonMw Top Specialist Care and Research (TZO) program, carried out by the neurosurgery research group of ETZ in collaboration with Tilburg University (including neuropsychologist/PhD candidate Iris Bras and senior researcher Karin Gehring).
  • Goings-On origin: The e-Health app was initiated by Petra Hoogendoorn based on personal experience as the partner of Richard van den Heuvel, who had a brain tumor, with the goal of making the question "What matters to you?" just as important as "What is the matter with you?". AllStack built the bridge between that patient experience and the clinician with Gesprekshulp.