Health and Care

The importance of the health & care theme within the DBC is unmistakable. The pressure on Dutch healthcare is enormous and the entire ecosystem feels it. Challenges with regard to funding, quality, affordability, workload, chain cooperation, staff shortages, fraud detection, healthy lifestyle and prevention. But also digitization in general such as integration and interoperability and, for example, permission to store, edit or exchange privacy-sensitive data in particular, are the order of the day.

Recent decentralized solutions such as blockchain, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer opportunities for innovation, to contribute to (partial) solutions to these challenges.

Decentralized technologies address a number of core values and challenges in Health & Care, such as trust, privacy, safety, legal correctness, accountability, accountability and irrefutability. This means that these technologies are potentially solutions to support or help healthcare and life sciences in the Netherlands (and abroad). This is not only a matter of technology, cooperation with partners in the ecosystem is also essential.

Together with parties from the business community, knowledge institutions and government, use cases are identified and realized to realize social and economic value. Poorly running systems may be improved by means of decentralised digital technologies. Consider, for example, the permission to exchange and use information, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) in healthcare, logistics processes in pharmacy, recording information about clinical studies and Health Technology Assessments (HTAs). The aim is to identify these use and improvement scenarios and to scale them up to national and international level in the long term.

Former theme lead Nicky Hekster has brought together a large group of relevant stakeholders from the triple helix in a working group, focusing on knowledge exchange and establishing relevant contacts. The entire sector is covered, including startups, Big Tech, MedTech, academic institutions, government agencies, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, associations, etc. (see the figure below). Several initiatives have emerged from this working group, with some already completed, such as the development of a federated marketplace for clinical research data with Triall. Examples of other recently initiated projects include the Passport for Self-Employed Healthcare Professionals and the registration of expensive medicines and opioids. All initiatives are developed through collaboration among various parties of different sizes.