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Mextra is an Electronic Client Record (ECR), or an online record where healthcare and social service providers enter progress reports—for example, regarding diagnoses, consultations, and treatments. With the help of MKB Datalab-Oost, Mextra now offers an additional feature: summarizing multiple reports into a single short, concise, and easy-to-understand text. This saves professionals time spent at the computer, allowing them to devote more attention to the client.<img class="image_resized" style="aspect-ratio:1600/758;width:96.76%;" src="https://cms.aihub-oost.nl/uploads/Mextra_d80f3d8dd0.jpeg?token=ubAiO4gVPBj7Jk6yPxByiQD5DnRdaUCHAlNWlDOGrI8&amp;expires=1777474168" alt="Mextra.jpeg" srcset="https://cms.aihub-oost.nl/uploads/thumbnail_Mextra_d80f3d8dd0.jpeg?token=YX21ZwDqemGnx_Q3kocF1p-7ZaHUG8-iAfrxMOWgx6k&amp;expires=1777474168 245w,https://cms.aihub-oost.nl/uploads/small_Mextra_d80f3d8dd0.jpeg?token=ADDtO0egSsNGgetWJHl0sG2LXevxw-JjK-RgqPxuaqk&amp;expires=1777474168 500w,https://cms.aihub-oost.nl/uploads/medium_Mextra_d80f3d8dd0.jpeg?token=j3ve_di5KldEWXjVSZda8RqjXpkHD_2-bYgg_3fOSag&amp;expires=1777474168 750w,https://cms.aihub-oost.nl/uploads/large_Mextra_d80f3d8dd0.jpeg?token=DYSqeRSCe2vhnQOKEWvM2SsDQLKmBCEUkxoVUL51pD0&amp;expires=1777474168 1000w," sizes="100vw" width="1600" height="758">“Our ECD is intended for professionals in long-term care. This includes youth services, organizations for people with intellectual disabilities, and other agencies in the social sector. Across 175 organizations in the Netherlands, 35,000 professionals work with Mextra,” says Geert Klein Breteler of <a href="https://mextra.nl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Mextra</a>.Since Mextra’s inception in 2000, the ECD has kept pace with the possibilities of digitization. “In the early years, we would regularly visit our clients with floppy disks to update the system and add new features,” Geert recalls. “Then, around 2006, when people started doing their banking online and booking trips online, we felt it was time for clients to be able to log in to their own care records as well, so we made the switch to ‘the cloud.’ Since then, Mextra has also been available to clients. They can log in themselves, read what the care provider writes, and respond to it.”<h2>From time spent at the computer to time spent with the client </h2>The goal of Mextra is to allow care providers to spend less time at the computer and more time with the person seeking care. “Care providers didn’t choose this profession because they love computers. They work with people. If we make our application smarter and more efficient, we reduce their administrative burden and allow them to spend more time on their real work—working with people.”In 2025, AI is all the rage. <blockquote>“You can’t open LinkedIn without seeing something about artificial intelligence (AI),” says Geert. “AI is all the rage; everyone wants to use it. But if you apply it correctly, it really adds value to your product.”</blockquote><h2>Help from an Artificial Intelligence Student </h2>As a result, Mextra accepted the invitation from AI-Hub Oost-Nederland to collaborate on a project with MKB Datalab-Oost. MKB Datalab-Oost offers accessible and affordable assistance to entrepreneurs who want to get started with AI and data. University students studying Artificial Intelligence and Data Science organize workshops and carry out projects in the business world.  “Eefke van Straaten, who is pursuing a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence at Radboud University Nijmegen, worked on a project with us in the first half of 2025. We also involved Mextra’s clients in the project so we could test the ideas directly with users,” says Geert.The tool that Eefke developed in collaboration with Mextra and Mextra’s clients makes it possible to consolidate progress reports on clients and then summarize them concisely. Geert: “On average, a social worker prepares such a summary every six months, for example, in preparation for a multidisciplinary consultation (MDO). Whereas it used to take them an hour, they can now do it in ten minutes with the help of Mextra. The input consists of progress reports stored in the ECD. There can be as many as a hundred of them. So it’s a large amount of input, which a language model turns into a short summary.”<blockquote>The tool is similar to ChatGPT, but with Mextra, everything is guaranteed to stay “in-house.” “It runs within the secure network of Microsoft Azure,” says Geert.</blockquote><h2>Mextra keeps the ‘human in the loop’ </h2>When asked about the challenges they encountered, Geert mentions three things. “First of all, the input from the ECD was too voluminous. You can enter a certain number of ‘tokens’ into the language model. We had to expand that limit, and we succeeded. Next, the tone in which the language model wrote the summaries didn’t match the way social workers speak with their clients. The professionals who participated in the testing phase found it to sound cold and technical. Thanks to their feedback, we were able to tailor the system to our preferences regarding tone and word choice,” says Geert.“Finally, we wanted to fine-tune the prompt so that the summary would precisely meet the users’ needs. A remedial educator who provided feedback shared a manual for care providers. We added the requirements for writing summaries listed in that guide to the prompt. That special education teacher was “flabbergasted” when she saw the result afterward. “I might change just one word!” she said, surprised.”Geert sees the fact that the user still has to adjust that one word as a positive rather than a negative. “We want to keep ‘the human in the loop,’” he says. “The care provider must read the summary and make any necessary adjustments. The trick is to find the balance between the time savings offered by AI on the one hand and the human touch of the professional on the other. The solution lies in a pop-up window where the professional must make an addition or change to the text before finalizing it.”<h2>Tip: Involve employees and users  </h2>According to Geert, the main advantage of having a student work on an AI application in your company is, first and foremost, the knowledge, experience, and expertise the student brings to the table. And secondly: “Where we’d just ‘fit it in’ on the side, Eefke can devote herself to it full-time,” says Geert.As a tip for other entrepreneurs who want to improve their processes or products with AI, Geert recommends involving employees in the process. “AI has a reputation for replacing jobs. It’s important for people to see that it adds value rather than taking anything away. I invited all my colleagues to the student’s final presentation. They were impressed!”Geert also cites customer participation as a key to success. “You can use the most cutting-edge technology, but testing the tool with future users is, in my view, a must. We had five care providers from two different clients, and their insights were extremely valuable.”  Want to get started with AI at your company too? Visit <a href="https://www.aihub-oost.nl/innoveren/mkb-datalab-oost" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">MKB Datalab-Oost</a> or email marianne.pouwer@oostnl.nl for more information.

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Mextra is an Electronic Client Record (ECR), or an online record where healthcare and social service providers enter progress reports—for example, regarding diagnoses, consultations, and treatments. With the help of MKB Datalab-Oost, Mextra now offers an additional feature: summarizing multiple reports into a single short, concise, and easy-to-understand text. This saves professionals time spent at the computer, allowing them to devote more attention to the client.