UZA – Forensic Medicine
With a custom solution in Oracle APEX, Universitair Ziekenhuis Antwerpen (UZA) offers an efficient and secure alternative to the local use of Access, Excel, and Word within the Forensic Medicine department. Contribute, a company from the Cronos Group, guided the entire development process.
- Company
UZA - Challenge
For Data Processing, UZA’s Forensic Medicine Department Relied on Access, Excel, or Word. UZA Sought an Efficient and Secure Alternative. - Solution
A custom-built application, developed using Oracle APEX and hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Contribute increases efficiency for forensic medicine with low-code custom solution in Oracle APEX
With a custom solution in Oracle APEX, UZA provides an efficient and secure alternative to the local use of Access, Excel, and Word in the Forensic Medicine department. Contribute, a company from the Cronos Group, managed the complete development process.
Universitair Ziekenhuis Antwerpen (UZA) is a university hospital renowned for clinical patient care, academic training, and scientific research. The hospital offers 38 specialized medical services, with over 600,000 patient visits annually. UZA employs around 2,800 people, including 400 doctors and 1,400 nurses. The ICT department consists of 90 full-time staff members, with 18 responsible for functional applications. This team works with a broad portfolio of administrative and medical applications, both developed in-house and purchased.
“In recent years, we’ve seen a growing need for structured, standardized, and automated data processing,” says Guy Lodewijks, ICT manager for functional applications at UZA. “There’s an overall increased demand for information. As a result, we’re seeing the administrative workload for caregivers grow.” One of the challenges for the ICT department is to provide the right applications to support caregivers effectively, so they can handle administration more efficiently and focus on their core tasks.
Quick response
It is in this context that hospital staff turned to using Access, Excel, or Word to store information in a simple way. “This is done with the best intentions,” says Guy Lodewijks, “even if it’s just to store certain data that doesn’t fit into the electronic patient record.” However, when these initiatives happen without the oversight of the ICT department, potential risks arise, such as security concerns or questions about new functionalities or additional performance needs.
The Forensic Medicine department had been using Access, Excel, and Word for case administration over the years: requests from the public prosecutor, information about crime scene visits (so-called “afstapping”), autopsy data, and so on. “The Forensic Medicine department came to us because the Access application needed an update,” explains Guy Lodewijks. “The performance was declining. To ensure the continuity of functionality and efficient data management, a new solution was needed.”
For the ICT department, this posed a significant challenge. “It’s an application with both an administrative and medical aspect, focusing on a process that the department follows: a series of steps that the user must complete.” A ready-made solution for forensic medicine wasn’t readily available. “We explored whether it would make sense to translate the applications to .NET, but that didn’t seem to be the case.”
Low-code
The advantage of all this study work is that the Forensic Medicine department and the ICT team now have a clear idea of what they want: a single platform that brings together the functionality of the old Access database, Excel, and Word files—with reasonable effort and budget. “Since we already had Oracle Database in-house, and the license for Oracle APEX was included, that platform came into focus,” says Guy Lodewijks. For functional analysis and operational project management, the hospital enlisted the services of Contribute, an Oracle specialist with extensive experience in application development.
Oracle APEX is a low-code environment bundled with Oracle Database. The low-code principle allows developers to focus entirely on the business problem, without the overhead typically associated with traditional development. This ensures a short lead time and the best of both worlds: a customized solution for a specific need, without the high costs usually associated with traditional software development.
More efficient administration, better reporting
Contribute’s APEX software factory developed the application for the Forensic Medicine department based on an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) environment. The production environment was initially hosted in UZA’s data center, with the goal of eventually moving the application to OCI. The application—known within the hospital as Obelix, covers all the functions that Forensic Medicine previously handled using Access, Excel, and Word. “It provides the department with an environment that offers the necessary standardization and control,” says Guy Lodewijks. “Users now have to follow the various steps in the process when managing a case, which automatically improves the quality of the reports, as everyone is registering and processing the collected data in a structured and standardized way.”
Thanks to the smooth collaboration with Contribute and the transition to Oracle APEX, not only is the functional continuity assured, but everything related to the ICT side of the story is as well. “The performance of the application is excellent,” says Guy Lodewijks. “Everything works very well, and we are currently working on optimizing the functionality.” In addition to the forensic doctors and other clinical staff, several administrative staff rely on Obelix, totaling around twelve users. “They use the application in the hospital, but also from home via Citrix. We’re not just happy that we’ve provided the department with a tool that supports its core tasks efficiently, but also that it can work securely. Contribute has, of course, ensured that the security and backup of Obelix are fully up-to-date.”
Contribute developed a new tool using the low-code platform Oracle APEX: it offers all the benefits of custom development without the high costs.
Guy Lodewijks, ICT-manager functional applications UZA
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