Our point of view on Prinsjedag on ICT&health

Prinsjesdag brought a new set of healthcare plans for the Netherlands. ICT&health asked our co-founder, Douwe Jippes, to unpack what they mean in practice. His answer starts with a simple but important distinction: paying healthcare providers less for a treatment may ease the budget this year. It does not make that treatment any cheaper to deliver. In his article, Douwe highlights several points that deserve more attention:

• The real test of healthcare technology is not simply whether it works, but what it allows us to stop doing, or do differently, once it does.
• Entrepreneurs deserve a seat at the table. But investment and reimbursement should follow proven results, not enthusiasm for yet another pilot.
• Too much innovation still stalls between pilot and structural adoption. Closing that gap means agreeing upfront, with insurers, healthcare providers and innovators, on what evidence is required and what level of reimbursement that evidence unlocks.
• The evidence is already there. ikHerstel, for example, guides patients digitally before and after surgery. In a randomised trial across eleven Dutch hospitals, patients using IkHerstel returned to normal activities a median of thirteen days sooner after major abdominal surgery, without an increase in complications.
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This is exactly the kind of debate that deserves more attention. If we want to keep healthcare accessible and affordable, we need to move beyond asking whether innovation works. We need to ask whether it allows us to organise and deliver care differently, and whether we are prepared to scale it when the evidence proves that it does. We are glad to contribute to that conversation on a platform that has been helping shape the debate around digital healthcare in the Netherlands for years.

Read Douwe’s full (Dutch) article on the website of ICT&health