Sebastiaan reflects on Zorg & ict 2025

Last Wednesday, April 9th, a colleague and I visited the annual Zorg & ict trade fair. I went as a 'visitor', but naturally, I also stopped by to see my colleagues at the Fundaments stand. It had been a few years since I last attended a trade fair, and in my view, this year's Zorg & ict was a proper event again: well-attended, a diverse audience, plenty of coffee and other treats, many stands, and interesting speakers.

Interesting sessions packed with information

With about 10 different rooms hosting sessions, the program was quite full this year. After some decision fatigue, we selected a number of engaging sessions and registered for them. That registration proved useful: some rooms were completely full even before the session began.

During our first session, we were taken through a story by an IT manager at Emergis, where there is an urgent need for innovation. He explained how they shifted their focus from the IT manager to the healthcare professional, placing them at the center of daily IT usage. Various smart integrations were implemented so that the caregiver no longer has to log into 10 different applications, but instead sees all relevant information and actions on a single dashboard. The goal (and proven effect) of this is to increase efficiency for caregivers. Meanwhile, I wondered how management has become more efficient for the IT service provider. Setting up and maintaining all these integrations will undoubtedly bring a significant management burden. This is where IT service providers can certainly standardize. Although the application landscape in healthcare is vast, you see many healthcare institutions using the same applications. And if you boil it down, the IT needs of the average caregiver come down to the same principles: user-friendly, available, and secure.

The next session we attended was by Extreme Networks. Here, we gained more of an IT service provider perspective. A trend I recognize at Fundaments: IT teams are difficult to build. Staff is scarce and expectations are rising. And that’s not even mentioning the (justified) increasing requirements in the field of information security. Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to our sector; healthcare staff also have to do more with less personnel. The keyword during this session was therefore: insight. In IT, we often talk about a 'single pane of glass'—being able to see how your environment or organization is performing at a glance. This is something we have also worked hard on at Fundaments. With tools like Grafana, we can translate all the data we measure within our client environments into valuable insights. For example, how much CO2 a cloud environment consumes, what the average uptime has been over the past quarter, or creating a 'heatmap' of the infrastructure.

There was also plenty to see on the exhibition floor itself

Between sessions, we walked past the many stands. What struck me is that there is less and less talk about technology, and more focus on the healthcare sector and how organizations want to deliver value there. You can also see this in the fact that IT service providers are increasingly taking over activities from healthcare organizations, also known as outsourcing. The level at which this happens and the pace at which it is handled are remarkably diverse. One moment I was listening to someone proudly explain that their network infrastructure is now outsourced (didn't we do that 10 years ago?), and the next I hear that the functional management of the most important applications (such as an EMR) of a regional hospital has been completely outsourced to an IT service provider.

Another thing that stood out is that Microsoft (still) occupies a large space. Literally, due to the size of their stand, but also because you see that at many other stands, (IT) services are still primarily characterized by things like 'seamless M365 integrations'. It did give me food for thought in the context of all the geopolitical developments. There were also some smaller stands with parties that chose a different approach, more focused on private and sovereignty. Especially in the field of AI, there were interesting stands. My standard question when they showed me the clever things they had devised was, of course, about where they process/host the data. Reassuringly, I consistently received the answer that they do it all on their own servers, "because you really don't want that in the Public Cloud." To which I could be brief: "Good for you!" These stands didn't have a huge stage this year, but who knows what that will look like next year.

Finally, there were a few interesting developments with a political character. On the main stage, the CIO of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport compared the Dutch IT infrastructure to a road network. Her conclusion was that this needs to be overhauled and become a fully public function. She wants to develop this together with the healthcare sector. The IT sector was not mentioned as a partner in this. I found that striking: the Netherlands is a world-class digital hub, partly thanks to facilities like AMS-IX, one of the largest internet exchanges in the world. This type of infrastructure is not a government initiative but is facilitated by private parties. There is also European legislation coming that implies that sharing medical data will become an opt-out (objecting) instead of an opt-in (giving consent), as we recently saw with the Donor Act. From the perspective of delivering good care quickly, I can understand this. In terms of privacy, it is at the very least interesting to see what this will mean.

On the journey home, a number of challenges that were also presented crossed my mind: how do we deal with the 64,000 unfilled healthcare vacancies that exist today? And how do we deal with the fact that the healthcare sector is currently the second most polluting sector for the environment? All in all, we had an interesting and very entertaining day at the fair.

‍