Aan tafel! / Around the table!

Since the Dutch Parliament put a stop to the bill for a national Electronic Patient Record in 2011, a decentralised health data exchange infrastructure has been in place. There was a lack of a national approach in which local and regional initiatives could be scaled up or linked. Interoperability is an ongoing challenge: despite promoting international standards, proprietary standards are still frequently used.

Consequently, in recent years, there has been a clear call from society to the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport to provide more direction. One consequence of this is the new Electronic Healthcare Data Exchange Act, which has been in force since 1 July, 2023.  Moreover, the Ministry of Health published the National Vision of the Health Information System in April 2023. It articulates the ambition to grow from an interoperable model to truly integrated care, based on the principles of data availability, direction and trust, in the period from 2023 to 2035.

Round tables

Shortly after publishing this Vision, the Dutch delegation met in Chicago during HIMSS23. As one of the largest international communities, the Dutch Community held a session in an interactive format, with 9 themed roundtable discussions. With more than 150 experts involved, their discussions resulted in a broad echo of the Dutch healthcare ecosystem. The following topics were discussed, led by an expert on the topic, including various fixed elements, such as the patient perspective, innovation, scalability and implementation:

1. Sustainability in healthcare
2. Networking in healthcare
3. API strategy: the thousand-things-cloth for healthcare
4. Secondary use of data - faster together towards a learning healthcare system
5. Data quality in healthcare - an undervalued concept?
6. Digital care from a patient perspective
7. Security & safety in healthcare
8. AI as a solution to healthcare bottlenecks
9. Labour market & digitalization

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