Sebastiaan blikt terug op Zorg & ict 2025

On Wednesday, April 9, I attended the annual Zorg & ICT trade fair together with a colleague. While I went in as a ‘visitor’, I of course also dropped by my colleagues at the Fundaments booth. It had been a few years since I last attended a trade fair, and this year’s edition of Zorg & ICT definitely felt like the real thing again: well-attended, a diverse audience, plenty of coffee and treats, a bustling exhibition floor, and strong speaker line-up.

Insightful sessions full of information

This year’s programme featured around 10 different rooms hosting sessions throughout the day. After some decision stress, we picked a few interesting sessions and registered in advance – which turned out to be wise, as some sessions were already full before they even started.

The first session we attended featured an IT manager from Emergis, who explained the urgent need for innovation within their organization. Their approach involved shifting the focus away from IT managers and putting the healthcare worker at the centre of IT usage. Smart integrations were created to eliminate the need for care staff to log in to ten different systems — now, all relevant information and actions are accessible from a single dashboard. The goal, and proven result, is to increase efficiency for healthcare providers.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder what the impact was for the IT department. Setting up and maintaining all those integrations must come with a heavy operational burden. IT service providers could play a role here by standardizing. Despite the fragmented application landscape in healthcare, many institutions use the same core applications. And when you boil it down, the average care provider’s IT needs usually come down to the same basics: user-friendly, available, and secure.

Next, we joined a session by Extreme Networks, which offered more of an IT service provider’s perspective — a world I recognize from Fundaments. Building effective IT teams is becoming harder, with increasing demands and growing pressure on information security. And this is not just an issue in our field — healthcare staff are also being asked to do more with fewer people.

The keyword in this session was insight. In IT we often talk about the need for a ‘single pane of glass’ — being able to monitor the state of your environment or organization at a glance. At Fundaments, we’ve invested a lot in that as well. Using tools like Grafana, we turn raw data into valuable insights — like how much CO₂ a cloud environment consumes, what the average uptime has been over the past quarter, or even a heatmap of infrastructure performance.

Plenty to explore on the show floor

Between sessions, we browsed the many stands. What stood out to me was how the conversation is no longer just about technology itself — the focus has shifted to how IT creates value in the healthcare sector. More and more tasks are being outsourced to IT providers, a trend we’ve seen grow steadily.

The pace and scope of this outsourcing vary widely. One minute, I was listening to someone proudly explaining that they had outsourced their network infrastructure (something we were already doing 10 years ago), and the next, I heard about a regional hospital outsourcing the functional management of their core applications — like their EHR — to an IT provider.

Microsoft still has a strong presence — both in the size of their booth and the fact that many other vendors highlight seamless M365 integrations. With everything happening geopolitically, this made me think. There were some smaller booths with companies offering alternative approaches focused on sovereignty and private infrastructure. The AI-focused stands were especially interesting.

Whenever someone demoed their smart AI tool, I would ask, “Where do you process and host the data?” And thankfully, the answer was consistently: on our own servers. “You really don’t want to put that in a public cloud.” To which I could only respond: “Exactly!”

These sovereign players didn’t yet have a major platform at this year’s fair, but who knows what next year will bring?

On the main stage, the CIO of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport made an interesting comparison between the Dutch digital infrastructure and the national road network. Her conclusion: it needs to be redesigned and should become a fully public asset — developed together with the healthcare sector. Strikingly, the IT sector was not mentioned as a stakeholder in this vision.

That’s surprising, considering the Netherlands is a major global digital hub — in large part thanks to private initiatives like AMS-IX, one of the largest internet exchange points in the world.

We also heard about new European legislation that will make the sharing of medical data an opt-out model rather than opt-in — similar to the recent organ donation law. From a care delivery standpoint, this makes sense. But in terms of privacy, it raises some serious questions.

On the train ride home, some key challenges presented during the fair came back to mind: how will we address the 64,000 unfilled jobs in healthcare? And how will we deal with the fact that the healthcare sector is currently the second most polluting sector in terms of environmental impact?

All in all, we had an insightful and enjoyable day at the fair.

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