Dutch mental healthcare nonprofit, Reinier van Arkel, addresses long waitlists with Dynamics 365

More than four in ten people in the Netherlands face mental health challenges in their lifetime, according to the Dutch government. Sometimes folks need a level of care that goes beyond what general practitioners or other providers can offer, and that is where Reinier van Arkel steps in. The Dutch nonprofit provides specialized mental health care to 14,000 people a year and traces its roots to 1442, when the Reinier van Arkel house was founded as the first mental health institution in the country. 

Yet the limited availability of specialists leads to long waits for people seeking care, not only for Reinier van Arkel but providers nationwide. “We receive more applications for care than we can provide,” explains Renske Brobbel, logistics coordinator at Reinier van Arkel. “We have a waiting problem, so we have to change.”

Reinier van Arkel worked with Microsoft partner Xperity to build a new client waitlist using Microsoft Community Care, a framework designed to enable care organizations to meet growing health care needs, generate better data, and serve a complex network of clients and providers—even with a smaller available workforce. Together, they used Microsoft Dynamics 365 to customize a platform that manages the flow of prospective patients from referral to the beginning of treatment. The new system automates and digitizes the client waitlist, enabling the organization to get people the care they need.

“Reinier van Arkel is pioneering in this area to implement this technology for a platform of engagement,” says Pieter de Wit, commercial manager and co-owner of Xperity. “Health care organizations want to spend more time working with people and less time on administration, which is where Dynamics works. Reinier van Arkel is using proven technologies to address the huge challenge of more and more patients needing mental health care.”      

Streamlining the mental health care waitlist

Reinier van Arkel’s old system “was not flexible at all,” remembers Brobbel. The waitlist existed in electronic patient files, where care teams kept everything from invoices to appointment notes. Staff typed details about a client’s needs, location, past treatments, and more into comment fields within their electronic patient file. They had to export the files to Excel multiple times a day to get a current snapshot of the waitlist. They also wrote custom code to sift through all that text to find relevant information, such as whether a client needed group therapy or employment support. The process of downloading and hunting through files posed a security risk and added inefficiencies while trying to get care for the many people waiting at any given time. 

“We can do a lot more in the Dynamics system,” Brobbel says. Now, as soon as a client submits an application for care, Power Automate transfers their information from the electronic health record to Dynamics 365. It populates fields, including the severity of the client’s situation, the kind of provider they need to see, their location, and more. The system triages the most urgent cases to the top of the waitlist. 

The new system also empowers staff to find care for patients faster. For example, if a practitioner has an opening, a Reinier van Arkel worker can easily filter to find a match “instantly,” Brobbel says. In addition, staff can use the new waitlist to specify if multiple treatments can be provided simultaneously or in a particular order. That way, someone could begin treatment for one concern while waiting for another type of care—leading to faster response times to serious mental health challenges. 

The Dynamics 365 waitlist sets the foundation for offering support as soon as people apply for care. Reinier van Arkel aims to build communication journeys through Dynamics 365 Marketing. These messages will automatically update clients of wait times and offer valuable resources, including links to virtual therapy, enabling clients to access immediate support.

Knowing where to grow

“Mental health care is a big bottleneck in the Netherlands, and across the world. There are a lot more people who need help than we have people to give that help,” Brobbel explains. As the Dutch population ages, and with not enough people entering the profession to provide that care, the mental health care gap will only widen. Reinier van Arkel is using data to inform where they need to grow to meet the specific needs of people in the Netherlands.

Dynamics 365 captures a rich tapestry of data: not only the number of people on the waitlist but also their geographic location, the type of care they need, past interactions with Reinier van Arkel’s services, demographic information, and more. Anonymized data respects clients’ privacy while revealing the most pressing backlogs so the nonprofit can direct resources to address them, such as hiring providers who specialize in PTSD or translators who can serve refugees and asylum seekers. Brobbel says, “We want to have the right providers in the right spots. The new waitlist will help us get the data to understand how to identify the bottlenecks.” 

The Dynamics 365-powered waitlist also provides a real-time snapshot of need. “The situation is accurate at the time you look. You can see changes instantly,” Brobbel explains. This improves on the old system, which had to be manually updated. Accurate data will also help the nonprofit track and respond to changes over time, such as expanding a treatment center in a city with an increasing number of clients seeking intensive mental health care. In addition, clear and current data helps Reiner van Arkel communicate both needs and impact to funders and other supporters, setting the stage for more investment and deeper capacity to provide mental health care.

Visibility into the country’s mental health needs will give Reinier van Arkel the confidence to plan how to grow—so it can support even more people in the future.

Find out more about Reinier van Arkel on Facebook and LinkedIn