Dutch healthcare strong on people, weak on tech, report finds

Dutch healthcare organisations are strong on collaboration and leadership but consistently choose to improve existing care rather than pursue the kind of fundamental innovation needed to deliver more care with fewer staff, according to a new report released this week.

The findings come from the first edition of the Innovation Monitor for Healthcare, produced by Amsterdam UMC, the University of Amsterdam, and SEO Economic Research on behalf of the Amsterdam Research Center for Health Economics and Management (ARCHEM). The report was presented on Thursday, September 3, at SPUI25 in Amsterdam, and is based on responses from 421 people across 9 healthcare organisations, along with 23 interviews with key informants.

Strong on people, weak on technology

The monitor assesses healthcare organisations across five "innovation levers": self-organisation, transformational leadership, human capital, social capital, and digital transformation. The first four are social levers; the fifth is technological.

The headline finding is a clear imbalance: the social levers are considerably more developed than digital transformation, which lags behind. Healthcare organisations are investing in ICT, but according to Henk Volberda, Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation at Amsterdam Business School, that investment isn't translating into organisation-wide change. "Technology only leads to renewal when organisations also adapt work processes, involve professionals, and make clear how the technology improves care or makes it easier to deliver," he said.

The report also found that Dutch healthcare organisations perform on par with businesses generally when it comes to innovation outcomes, but fall notably behind on AI maturity — particularly around data and technology infrastructure. Where AI is used, it tends to support existing staff rather than replace tasks outright.

The existing gaps

One of the more striking findings is a perception gap: healthcare professionals view both the conditions for innovation and its outcomes less positively than managers and support staff do. Most professionals see innovation as part of their job, but many say they lack the additional training and skills needed to actively drive change.

Across the sector, incremental innovation — improvements to existing care focused on efficiency, predictability, and safety — is far more common than radical renewal. "Fail and learn" approaches, which allow organisations to experiment and explore new models of care, remain rare.

"There is a great deal of energy and willingness to innovate, but the conditions for doing so — including time, space, influence and targeted training — are still insufficient," said Annamarike Seller-Boersma, co-director of ARCHEM.

Collaboration remains confined

The report also found that healthcare organisations mostly innovate together with other providers in their own domain, along with patients and suppliers. Collaboration with health insurers, long-term care offices, and government bodies remains comparatively limited — even though the researchers argue that's exactly where the next wave of opportunity lies.

"Health insurers, long-term care offices and government bodies are essential to creating the conditions for renewal," said Jeroen de Mast, ARCHEM's other co-director. "They cannot remain on the sidelines."

The researchers frame the findings as a call to action against a backdrop of an ageing population, staff shortages, and rising costs. As Seller-Boersma put it: those pressures "do not call for more of the same, but for a different way of working." Doing so, the report concludes, will require healthcare organisations to explicitly confront the tension between delivering care today and finding the time and space to reinvent how it's delivered tomorrow.