Accelerating regional data infrastructures to advance prevention in healthcare

Why Invest-NL Contributes to Regional Data Infrastructures

Dutch healthcare is under increasing pressure due to rising demand, scarce staff, and rising costs. At the same time, the greatest health gains are often achieved through disease prevention. This calls for a different way of funding: not paying for treatments, but for demonstrable health outcomes.  

Data infrastructures may seem like a different topic at first glance, but they are actually intrinsically linked to the success of outcome-based financing. If we want to steer, innovate, and pay based on results, those results must also be reliably and timely accessible. Data infrastructures play a crucial role in this. 

Data as a Prerequisite for Outcome-Based Financing

Outcome-based financing can accelerate prevention and collaboration across domains. Invest-NL has been working on this topic for some time. For example, we conducted research into cross-sectoral care, explore outcome-based financing on a larger scale with the initiative GelijkGezond, and develop financing models for prevention via the program Gezond Rendement NL.  

In practice, outcome-based financing often hits a bottleneck: results must be reliable, objective, measurable in a timely manner—and this is precisely where the challenge lies. The necessary data is fragmented across health insurers, municipalities, care providers, and the social domain. Not all data is available or shareable, and some data is too coarse or primarily designed for administration. This makes it difficult to set up and scale outcome-based financing. 

What Regional Data Infrastructures Enable

Regional data infrastructures make it possible to securely connect data from healthcare, the social domain, and public health. Initiatives such as GERDA (Achterhoek) mainly demonstrate that an infrastructure for analyzing, measuring, and steering based on sensitive data can be technically organized securely. 

With such an infrastructure, it becomes possible to: 

• Measure better outcomes, such as changes in healthcare utilization or societal costs; 
• Decide faster based on insights into target groups, effects, and risks; 
• Make investments scalable because financiers can steer based on demonstrable results. 

Moreover, Invest-NL's research shows that technology is often not the biggest obstacle. Governance, privacy, trust between parties, and especially clear legal frameworks are often decisive for successful collaboration. 

Next Steps: From Research to Lessons from Practice

Based on this research, Invest-NL supports the initiative RIGA, a collaboration of healthcare and welfare organizations in the Westland-Schieland-Delfland region, in developing a regional data infrastructure (a project carried out with support from the European Union – InvestEU Advisory Hub). Invest-NL facilitates the legal framework needed to securely and structurally connect health, living environment, and socio-economic data. By linking data from different domains, decision-making, accountability, and financing can be better supported. This also provides an important basis for enabling outcome-based financing.

The insights and lessons from this project will be shared later this year. This will show other initiators and policymakers how regional data infrastructures can be securely, legally sustainable, and practically feasible to support outcome-based financing.