'The traditional way of thinking about care must be abandoned'

In order to keep healthcare affordable, accessible and organized, the Netherlands faces major challenges. ICT solutions can play an important role in this. Eddy van de Werken, chairman of OIZ - the advocate of Dutch ICT suppliers in healthcare - advocates the arrival of unambiguous standards for information exchange between healthcare sectors. "Because through better efficiency, more people can provide care with the same effort."

As president of OIZ, the Dutch Association of Healthcare ICT Organizations, Van de Werken's important mission includes reducing the workload of healthcare professionals. "With ICT, we can help take work off the hands of healthcare professionals so that they can do more actual patient care. Everything should be geared toward being able to give every Dutch person the care he or she needs to grow old healthily to some degree." 

One of the challenges here, according to Van de Werken, is to achieve unambiguous standards for information exchange between different healthcare sectors, such as hospitals, general practitioners, dentists and home care organizations. "What you see is so far each healthcare sector has its own information system. At the same time, healthcare providers are being asked to work together more and more and thus share information with each other. Therefore, it is important to have a unified information system where information can be transferred from one healthcare facility to another error-free and without time delay. This is what is currently lacking."

With the information system the OIZ chairman envisions, it is important that the information exchanged is not open to multiple interpretations, he emphasizes. "For example, a specialist in the hospital will sometimes use different medical designations for a certain clinical picture than a general practitioner. This means that an unambiguous information standard is not only a matter of ICT technology, but above all of semantics, or in other words: an unambiguous definition about which there can be no discussion. And then we haven't even mentioned safeguarding the privacy of patient information. That aspect, too, makes data sharing extra complex." In short, a job for which much work remains to be done. Once the joint ICT suppliers in the Netherlands succeed in building such cooperation between systems, however, the healthcare sector will only reap the benefits, Van de Werken is convinced. "Now, for example, it is still often the case that you have to have a blood test performed at several healthcare institutions. But if there is an adequate system for information exchange between healthcare providers, you can avoid such duplications in the future. That will ensure better efficiency, allowing more people to provide care with the same effort."

When it comes to important ICT developments in healthcare, the conversation also quickly turns to Artificial Intelligence. Van de Werken: "These developments are moving very fast. For example, it is already possible to assess a prostate tumor using an AI analysis, even much better than a urologist ever could. And it will increasingly move in that direction. Therefore, we will have to learn to accept that we will no longer always receive care from a natural person. Who knows, maybe in the foreseeable future a care robot will come to your home instead of a home care worker to administer medication. As a result of technological developments, care by a traditional doctor or nurse will therefore increasingly be taken over by an AI tool or other device. Either way, we will all have to let go of our traditional way of thinking about care. Because only in this way can we keep care affordable and maintain the current level of care for the future."