Within this project we work together with a large consortium of healthcare providers, some large companies and many SME-parties to create a PGO ecosystem for the Netherlands, as a flywheel for necessary innovations in care and activity in the North Netherlands. Due to an ageing population, the demand for care in the near future will be much higher than what the (professional) care supply can cope with. The current way of providing care has become unsustainable and will have to innovate firmly. Technological progress is crucial. In the North of the Netherlands, this challenge is extra big: already already, the shortages of, for example, general practitioners and nurses are noticeable. Another major challenge is the fragility of the Northern Netherlands economy, in which health care is also the largest economic sector! It is desirable that innovation in eHealth applications in the North of the Netherlands is greatly stimulated. Solution VIA PGO'SDit plan aims to connect both challenges and provide a solution for it, by creating a flywheel for healthcare innovation, namely the realisation of an “open ecosystem for PGOs”. A PGO (Personal Health Environment) gives citizens functionalities to manage their health themselves and allows them to participate digitally in their own healthcare network. Prevention and self-reliance are increasing, so (in)formal care can be provided even more ‘in the right place’, the pressure on the professional care provision is reduced and citizens remain healthier. PGOs can only develop properly if they can connect professional data from healthcare providers and own data from citizens (self-introduced, but also obtained via wearables, for example), but on the care side it is only worthwhile investing in these data if there are sufficient PGOs with sufficient critical mass. A typical chicken egg problem! Planin the North of the Netherlands already exists a good cooperation between healthcare providers in the field of ICT in the GERRIT Foundation, within which an exchange infrastructure for care has been established, with which the region is absolutely at the forefront of the Netherlands. With a large part of these healthcare providers and together with the industry in the North of the Netherlands, we want to develop this infrastructure towards an open and safe infrastructure for exchange with PGOs. Through the implementation of various use-cases, in which different applications are used for patients/citizens in different care situations, we want to achieve a critical volume of use, with an impact on care. We then encourage the care and SMEs parties to realise more far-reaching new developments ‘on’ this infrastructure. This creates the intended flywheel for healthcare innovation.
