About

Our Mission

At CareFacts we are on a mission to provide the best tools and the best practices to improve the quality of the care you provide. Enabeling you to to learn from every patient-doctor interaction!

Our Purpose

Our purpose is to make it easy and highly rewarding to gain insight into the quality of care. Patients, doctors and healthcare organisations want to know what determines good care: with respect to other patients that came before, with respect to the literature, other doctors and other healthcare providers. By helping you to collect relevant data and integrating the results into the healthcare process we will guide you from registration of outcomes, to quality control, to quality improvement.

What discerns us from others:

  • We have intimate knowledge of the healthcare sector and create solutions tailored to end-users
  • We have years of experience in setting up complex studies and registrations in a variety of medical fields
  • We are a non-profit network of independed specialists
  • We are not a political institute or an organisation seeking power and influence
  • We are not an ICT company selling software
  • GemsTracker is open source and has a non-contagious licence for commercial and non-commercial purposes:
    • When you develop your GemsTracker site, the site is truly yours, all IP is transferred to you and you can do with it as you please
    • GemsTracker has been developed with the help of many, both public and private, parties. Therefore, also your contribution to the development of the Gemstracker core software is greatly appriciated.
  • We are open about our development roadmap and try to bring parties together to collectively finance new functionality. We do not re-sell features paid for by one customer to another customer. We try to keep costs down by developing collectively.

The Team

We are a growing community of developers, software architects, (data)scientists, consultants enthousiastic about our Mission. Interessed in joining our cause? Send us a message at: community@carefacts.nl

The story of GemsTracker:

2006: UserMan

GemsTracker's predecessor (Userman) was originally used as a respondent tracking system for clinical trials and population studies at the department of Public Health of the Erasmus MC. The department saw a growing demand for health research during the healthcare process (Research at the workplace). UserMan was designed as an extension to the functionality of the survey package LimeSurvey, allowing researchers to send the right survey to the right person at the right moment for the first time.

2009: GemsTracker

In collaboration with the Department of Plastic Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine of Erasmus MC and the Xpert Clinic the development of GemsTracker started from the ground up. With funding from the Coolsingel Foundation the existing software could be made more suitable for use in research and quality registrations in the healthcare process.

2011: Open Source

GemsTracker is now an independent system which can communicate with different questionnaire systems (including LimeSurvey). In September 2011, the software was published in the open source community (using the new BSD licence) to promote the transparency of the code, the continuous improvement of the quality and the wide availability at a low cost to healthcare providers and research institutions.

2011: Pulse & Equipe Zorgbedrijven

GemsTracker was used as a basis to greatly extend the functionality of the platform to accomodate quality registrations during the healthcare process. The implemantation of GemsTracker at Equipe Zorgbedrijven, Pulse, is used to monitor outcomes at the Xpert Clinic, Helder Kliniek and Velthuis Kliniek. Pulse functionality includes personal patient pages, higly integrated measurement tracks based on appointments and extreme value detection.

2013: Depar & ZonMw

In 2013 Cicero Rheumatology started the Depar study. This was the first but not the last GemsTracker project financed by ZonMw. The Depar study started with 11 hospitals working together and financed a massive extension of GemsTracker, enabling the automatic import of patient data, appointments and even measurements.

2016: Carefacts

The growing need to support multi-center studies and (inter)national registries led us to look for common project management of new projects using GemsTracker. We set up Carefacts to allow interested parties to quickly have a test site available where they can try the software. When a project is ready for deployment to patients and staff the customer can choose for either custom deployment on their own servers or using a standardized hosting solution at our partner True.nl.