Address to the Global Digital Health Platform

Thank you for the opportunity to be present today at the Global Digital Health Partnership meeting.

Health care delivery in the Netherlands mainly is private, so decision making demands all parties to support the direction taken. For that we in 2014 started a Health Care Council that decides on standards and goals, with the whole system in the room including patients, doctors, nurses, payers and patients and bringing the consensus needed.

We have set a number of steps and like to share those with you and hopefully come to international harmonization of our efforts:

  • Patients in the Netherlands are entitled by law to get their own data digitally, as much as possible in a structured way, in a Personal Health Environment from all health care providers by July next year. Governed by a patient led coalition we therefore are building a trust framework called MedMij (see this animation or read about the Information Standards underlying it).
  • MedMij is mostly based on FHIR profiles enforcing also semantic interoperability by specifying the elements to be exchanged. For semantic interoperability we defined clinical building blocks (see this page for more information) consisting of relevant mostly international terms (from languages such as Snomed or Loinc) describing clinically relevant concepts (such as blood pressure).
  • Over 400 million euros go to health care sectors to be able to do this.
  • There is a new law in the making to step by step force electronic exchange of data between health care providers with enforced standards both leading to technical and semantical interoperability. We will force the use of certified systems adhering to the standards. We will do so step by step, usecase by usecase. With the content of the exchange defined by doctors, nurses and other care providers themselves As the Netherlands shifts to value based healthcare with outcome measures for more than 50% of disease burden, data needed for outcomes will be part of the standards. Read the letter to Parliament on electronic data exchange.
  • Industry is accepting being obliged to share data and not monopolize patients data. Read this letter to Parliament for more information on our data strategy.