Amphia chose MetaVision for its unmatched focus on critical care — going beyond hospital-wide EHR systems

About Amphia Hospital

Amphia Hospital, a leading teaching hospital located in Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, has built a strong reputation for delivering exceptional care. With approximately 600 beds, 280 medical specialists, and 4,500 staff members, Amphia handles over 500,000 outpatient visits and 30,000 admissions and surgical procedures annually. The hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is one of the largest in the region, housing 30 beds and supporting critical care needs across the community.

The challenge

Amphia Hospital was at a turning point, facing a critical decision on whether it should replace its existing critical-care dedicated MetaVison clinical information system with a single, unified hospital-wide electronic health record (EHR) platform. In considering its options, the hospital took careful stock of the unique characteristics and requirements of the critical care department.

Amphia’s ICU generates between 400,000 to 700,000 data points per patient per day – far more than the other hospital departments. For ICU clinicians, timely access to this data is essential for rapid clinical decision-making. However, most hospital-wide EHRs lack the granularity, configurability, and open access required to support ICU workflows. The system needs to be able to handle the huge data volume, including retaining all data even for patients who stay in the ICU for extended periods, without performance degradation.

The solution

Independent research commissioned by Amphia determined that a hospital-wide EHR system would not provide the ICU with the advanced capabilities it required. The research report confirmed the need for a dedicated system for critical care and helped clarify that MetaVision continued to offer the best match for Amphia’s ICU.

The reasons that Amphia had originally chosen MetaVision for critical care when it was first transitioning away from paper-based systems still stand today. Now, as then, MetaVision stands out for its:

• Extensive configurability, including easy ability to tailor workflows to match Amphia ICU’s unique demands
• High granularity of data, providing ICU clinicians with comprehensive data crucial for monitoring critically ill patients and enhancing patient safety
• An open database that offers free access to data, enabling the hospital to develop custom algorithms to suit workflows and generate insights rapidly, often within a single day.

Ruud de Waal, leading ICU Intensivist at Amphia Hospital who also serves as President of the Dutch Medical Information Management Network and a board member of the Dutch ICU Database, shared his expertise and experience as the hospital evaluated its options. His prior positive experience implementing MetaVision at another hospital in The Netherlands and his extensive network within the country’s ICU community had supported the original choice. More recently, due to his ongoing work with the system at Amphia, he contributed unique insights, reinforcing the research findings that led the Hospital Board to keep MetaVision in the ICU.

He summarizes: “We decided to stay with MetaVision mostly for two reasons. One is that hospital-wide systems are not dedicated to complex environments like the ICU. And the second one is interoperability, which is the future of all ICT in healthcare. A system should interface with every other system around it, and MetaVision is very capable in doing that.”

The results

From the beginning, MetaVision enabled Amphia to streamline key clinical workflows and improve collaboration among clinicians and nursing teams for optimum patient safety and outcomes. Retaining MetaVision has allowed Amphia to preserve the ICU’s ability to capture, analyze, and act quickly on critical patient data. The system’s fine-grained data collection supports optimal patient monitoring in critical care, ensuring that clinical decisions are based on the most current and comprehensive information available.

Worry-free interoperability

Interoperability is a cornerstone of MetaVision – an aspect that is keenly understood by Dr. de Waal. He notes that MetaVision can smoothly connect with diverse hospital and external systems, ensuring that data flows freely across within the ICU and across departments.

Critical agility during crises

MetaVision helps Amphia respond effectively to both planned and unforeseen events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amphia had to urgently expand ICU capacity by converting other hospital units into temporary ICUs. MetaVision’s easy configurability and scalability allowed the hospital to adapt its workflows quickly, maintaining efficient care delivery and data access even in high-pressure situations.

“MetaVision allows us to access all critical patient data instantly. When the Dutch infection control agency required urgent data, we were able to generate essential reports within an hour.”
Dr. Ruud de Waal, ICU Intensivist, Amphia Hospital

Empowering ICU research and benchmarking

MetaVision also played a pivotal role in Amphia’s participation in the Dutch ICU database, ensuring that critical care data is easily reported for national benchmarking and clinical research initiatives. The hospital’s ability to generate reports quickly and with high detail gives it an edge in both internal quality improvement and external collaborations.

Future-proofing ICU care

Dr. de Waal is keen to see new capabilities added to the MetaVision platform and is particularly enthusiastic bringing more mobility to clinicians’ work. Amphia was a Beta site for iMDsoft’s MobileVision for Nurses app, which it plans to fully implement later in 2025. He explained: “When your ICU patients are transferred to radiology or the operating room, you can’t take your computer with you. You need portable solutions that allow you to input and retrieve data as though you were still in the ICU.”

Amphia continues to explore innovations and provides valuable real-world input that helps refine the capabilities of the MetaVision platform. It is considering becoming an early adopter of the Transition of Care module, which streamlines the handover of current and planned treatment information as patients move between the ICU and other clinical environments.

“In the complex environment of the ICU, which is not a normal ward, a dedicated system is essential. MetaVision is a dedicated system. It’s flexible, has high granularity and a very good GUI, and it offers a far better overview than most systems.”
Dr. Ruud de Waal, ICU Intensivist, Amphia Hospital

This successful outcome highlights Amphia’s commitment to critical care excellence and the value of specialized solutions like MetaVision ICU. This case study is shared in collaboration with our trusted local partner, Itemedical, who supports Amphia and many other Dutch and Belgian hospitals with MetaVision ICU.