Netherlands

Current Logo

Year of establishment

1992

Number of members

190, from which 94 are healthcare providers, the rest are IT-vendors and government agencies

Current Chair

Jan-Eric Slot

Technical Lead and working groups

Technical leadership is provided by the HL7 NL Core Team, consisting of Frank Ploeg, Yvonne Pijnacker Hordijk, Robin van Everdingen, and Niek van Galen. The team oversees activities across standards maintenance, community engagement, education, and communication, and works closely with the Active Member Forum (ALF), which manages operational execution and stakeholder coordination.
We have standing maintenance groups for v2, v3/CDA, and FHIR. FHIR maintenance is carried out in close collaboration with the FHIR-NL Board and Validation Team, who guide the registration and validation of HL7 FHIR-NL profiles. Other work is performed within project teams, based on agreed Project Scope Statements, or in ad-hoc groups.

Our HL7 Academy coordinates (virtual) trainings for v2, CDA, and FHIR. Many of our experts actively participate in international working groups, WGMs, and FHIR Connectathons, ensuring strong alignment with global developments.

Some highlights and major achievements - since establishment

Cooperation with government institutions

The Dutch Ministry of Health has started a project to prepare for the new Law on Electronic Data Exchange in Healthcare. HL7 Netherlands is understandably quite involved in the development of national norms that the regulation under this new Law will reference, including the standards that support specific business use-cases.

HL7 Netherlands is one of the earliest members of SDO NL, the cooperation between nine standard development organizations in The Netherlands. SDO NL has an experts community that advises the IT-government board of the Dutch Ministry of Health. Because of the FHIR API becoming popular, the HL7 delegation is involved in almost all current projects at the government. Furthermore, HL7 Netherlands is used as input source to the Informatieberaad, a policy making club from the healthcare field organized by the government. Last but not least, HL7 Netherlands has contacts with dozens of non-profit organizations in healthcare, like the patients federation, the doctors federation, the Dutch CMIO club, the BI-center of the payers, the producers of the medical thesaurus Dutch Hospital Data and the producers of the medication thesaurus Z-Index.

Project Highlights

Our achievements go hand in hand with the progress of the international HL7 standards. HL7v2 is widely used by all hospitals and other healthcare providers. CDA and v3 are used by multiple large national projects, from which the Landelijk Schakel Punt (national registry for medical information) is the most famous one. FHIR has been selected by dozens of Dutch organizations and projects to be used as de facto API for all new developments, including MedMij, the Dutch national project for connecting personal health environments. HL7 Netherlands invites all bigger projects involving all HL7 standards to join the Dutch working group meeting, held twice a year.

Plans for the future

We are working on publishing the FHIR R4 set of FHIR-NL profiles, based on the 2020 (and 2024) version of the Health and Care Information Models (or Clinical Buildingblocks, “zibs” in Dutch). The discussion has caught FHIR with an "API strategy" being developed by Nictiz, the Dutch competence centre for electronic exchange of health and care information. HL7 Netherlands will, of course, provide substantial input to this strategy.