Innovative Healthcare Data Sharing in the Netherlands: Q&A with Teun van Bladel of KPN Health.

KPN Health’s Teun van Bladel on their innovative KPN Health Exchange, winner of an InterSystems Impact Award 2025

Q1. What are the social and economic benefits of KPN’s Health Exchange project, and how do you attribute these returns to the digital innovations and ICT solutions provided by KPN?

Teun van Bladel: The KPN Health Exchange has significant impact in both social and economic benefits. Some examples of impact are a decrease of unnecessary or unwanted care, a decrease of administrative burden, a shift to care at home and digital care, optimizing patient flow and triage between multiple organizations, increase of use of the patient’s social support network and increase in perceived quality of care and job satisfaction. These examples translate to thousands of working hours and millions of euros saved.

Q2. How does KPN’s Health Exchange project integrate legacy systems and ensure data quality, and what challenges did KPN face in this process?

Teun van Bladel: KPN Health Exchange integrates legacy systems by standardizing data from different healthcare providers and collaborating closely with EHR vendors. Challenges included the fragmented IT landscape with dozens of vendors, the lack of standardized data sharing protocols and the quality and structure of data, often in plain text. KPN worked with customers to inventory and structure the data, ensuring it met business rules and at the same time keeping it scalable and reusable. The standardized data has to be used in serval different work processes without having to set up ETL’s per process or usage. InterSystems provided the technical framework and standards to facilitate data standardization and interoperability. KPN’s approach to data sharing also emphasizes collaboration and co-creation with healthcare providers, rather than competition.

Q3. What specific features of KPN’s Health Exchange project contribute to its technological innovation?

Teun van Bladel: KPN’s Health Exchange project is technologically innovative with its focus on advanced data availability and standardization, integration of data from various healthcare entities, co-creation with healthcare providers, and the use of AI to enhance data accessibility and relevance. It creates a federated data layer enabling healthcare organizations to work together in different networks. It also supports the European Health Data Space initiative, ensuring that a predefined set of data is available across European countries and that patients can easily access their health data through user-friendly apps.

The InterSystems products we use in KPN Health Exchange consist of InterSystems IRIS for Health, Health Connect, and HealthShare (including Health Insight). InterSystems IRIS was used to standardize and centralize healthcare data. This platform enables seamless integration and communication according to interoperability protocols, enhancing data quality and making it accessible across various applications and healthcare providers.

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Teun van Bladel, Product Manager at KPN Health for the Health Data Exchanges.

In this role, Teun oversees the development of products and services that enable data availability in healthcare, focusing on regional collaboration, patient engagement, digital health applications, secure networks, and secondary use of data.

Teun’s background lies in direct patient care and healthcare IT implementing and optimizing EHR’s, connecting EHR’s with RIS and LIS systems. He works with a team of integration specialists, architects, and FHIR experts, collaborating with clients in Healthcare and Social Care to address the challenges to Dutch healthcare arising from staff shortages, increasing costs, aging population, complex legislation, and a fragmented IT landscape. These efforts converge in the Health Exchange, which serves as a foundation for healthcare organizations to digitize and innovate in a rapidly evolving landscape.

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PUBLIC SECTOR & HIE 

Organization: KPN Health
Innovation Name: KPN Health Exchange 

Regional Winner – EMEA 

KPN Health Exchange is a platform that drives change in the healthcare sector by providing a secure, fast, and compliant infrastructure for data sharing based on the InterSystems technology with IRIS for Health and UCR. This innovative solution ensures that healthcare professionals, staff, and researchers can access and utilize patient and client data with unparalleled efficiency, thanks to its advanced data standardization and structuring capabilities. By bridging the gaps in a fragmented healthcare landscape, KPN Health Exchange fosters seamless collaboration and improved decision-making, leading to significant social and economic benefits. The platform can save millions of euros and thousands of working hours, while enhancing patient care through comprehensive and accessible health information. With ambitious plans to expand data access and align with the European Health Data Space, KPN Health Exchange with partners, like InterSystems, aims to redefine the healthcare industry, making it more efficient, patient-centric, and data-driven. 

Sponsored by InterSystems and selected by an independent panel of judges from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).