van Spoed naar Steun — Emergency care platform
About
A referral tool for emergency physicians — connecting vulnerable patients to social care at the hardest moment: discharge.
Amsterdam has 180+ social support services for people without stable housing, insurance, or documentation. Emergency physicians at OLVG Oost knew they existed. They just couldn't find them mid-shift.
Discharge from the Emergency Department often meant one thing for the most vulnerable patients: the street. Not because staff didn't care — but because there was no fast, reliable way to connect a patient to what came next. Referrals were ad hoc or absent entirely.
We designed and built the infrastructure to catch them.
“We save them from death. Not from life.”
— Dr. Niels van der Naald, Emergency Physician, OLVG
The constraint
The brief was uncompromising:
- No patient data — ever
- No logins, no accounts
- Usable in under 60 seconds on a phone, mid-shift, one hand
- Works for staff, not just for patients
- Don't add complexity to an already overloaded system
OLVG is one of the most process-heavy environments you can build for. Procurement, compliance, legal, stakeholder sign-off — none of that moves fast, and none of it should. We didn't try to move faster than the system could absorb. We controlled our own process: tight scope, short iterations, decisions documented.
Solution
This wasn't a two-week sprint. It was a full service design project — stakeholder-led, ethically grounded, built with the people who'd actually use it.
Step 1: Research & framing
Desk research mapped 180+ Amsterdam services from sources like Het Blauwe Boekje and NGO directories. Data scraped and normalised in collaboration with LinkZorg. Interviews with Dr. van der Naald, HVO-Querido, and frontline social workers shaped every major decision — including icon-based handouts (many 3U patients have low Dutch proficiency), "last verified" maintenance flags (outdated info is a real barrier), and a map-first interface (ED staff focused on distance, not lists).
Step 2: Prototype & validate
Figma prototype built, tested, and approved by ED staff at OLVG Oost on 26 May 2025. Live provocations tested and rejected — auto-referrals, persona-based handout decks, live feeds — all ruled out. Too complex, too slow, or ethically risky. The discipline was the design.
Step 3: Build & deploy
Sinyo built the production version in two days after months of design and validation. Not a simple static site: a normalised database of 180+ services with structured metadata, map-first filtering logic across multiple dimensions, location-based proximity sorting, mobile-first one-handed layout. Zero authentication layer — a deliberate architectural choice, not an omission. Stack: Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS · Vercel.
Speed at the end is earned by clarity at the start.
What shipped
- Deployed web tool, approved by ED staff at OLVG Oost — filtering 180+ Amsterdam services by proximity, type, and opening hours
- Physical A5 referral card — city map on one side, space for handwritten notes on the back. Tangible. No language skills or phone required.
- Maintenance protocol — "last verified" dates, flagging for outdated listings, quarterly partner check-ins. Feasible and honest about what a small team can sustain.
- Zero patient data in the system — compliant by design, not by patch
Results
- Reduced friction at the most critical handover point in emergency care
- Map-first interface makes service discovery possible in under 30 seconds
- Physical referral card validated in real ward conditions
- System architecture built for long-term ownership by a municipal team or NGO — no permanent dev required
- Third-party institutional validation: HvA press article (28 May 2025), named OLVG, named the physicians, publicly indexed
“Honderd procent zeker dat we dit gaan gebruiken. Dit helpt ons enorm.”
— ED staff, OLVG Oost, prototype validation session
Useful links
Credits
What's next
van Spoed naar Steun is live. It still has to go further.
What it needs now is someone to own maintenance, a pilot partner who can embed it in routine practice, and funding to keep it current — not a one-off handover.
If you work in Amsterdam healthcare, municipal services, or care innovation and this sits in your remit, we'd like to hear from you.
Email usService data was last reviewed September 2025. Opening hours and availability change — always confirm directly with each service before referring someone.
next project
BR-ND PeopleA website that finally matches the quality of the work behind it