Coronavirus: how Mendix applications are helping Gemeente Rotterdam

The corona crisis has turned the country upside down. The Netherlands is going into quarantine on a massive scale. More than 600,000 residents of Gemeente Rotterdam have to adapt to a new way of living.

Meanwhile, the city's development team is busy delivering technology to flatten the viral transmission curve.

Normally the GGD uses off-the-shelf software to register symptoms, positive or negative test results and the course of treatment. But new characteristics of COVID-19 were being discovered every day. The GGD found that their software could not record the new information.

Gemeente Rotterdam fights COVID with smart applications

The software was not flexible enough to fix this problem in the short term either. So they used an Excel spreadsheet that they could adapt to register patients, symptoms, tests and patients' places of residence, whether they had been admitted to hospital or sent home to stay in quarantine.

The GGD reported their results regularly, in the Excel spreadsheet, to the Business Intelligence team. This allowed them to establish the number of infections and the mortality rates. They soon discovered missing and inconsistent data and countless errors in the report. That made it extremely difficult to put together a reliable report.

Custom software

It was 48 hours of hard graft, but it was worth it

The mayor is full of praise for the speed with which the Mendix application was developed. The GGD is pleased with the reliability of the data and can now enter data in a structured way and run good-quality reports. That is essential for registering potentially infected corona patients.

The impact of this new smart application is that the figures are more reliable, faster and more consistent. It greatly increases the confidence of the people dealing with this crisis in the decisions they take.

Positive impact

The doctors responsible for all these patients did not know (initially) how many of the patients were infected or where the patients were. With this data at their disposal, they have more confidence and can do their work more easily.

Erik van der Steen, RAD coordinator (Rapid App Development) in the Software Development department, leads a team of implementation partners and development experts who build custom applications for the city's services and departments.

Working with internal parties (such as social services and public safety), the team has delivered more than 40 applications in two years. Van der Steen and his team are glad that their work has a positive impact on the city and its citizens.

Because of the great success of the Mendix application, Gemeente Rotterdam is going to brief other municipal health services on how they pulled it off.

JAM-IT is proud to make a valuable contribution in these turbulent times.

Does your organisation have a similar problem? Then get in touch with us, perhaps we can do something for you too.

Click here to read more about Gemeente Rotterdam's contribution to the fight against the coronavirus.

Manning, M. (2020, 29 April). Municipality of Rotterdam Fights COVID with Custom Software. Retrieved from https://www.mendix.com/blog/rotterdam-delivers-relief/