MPC for regional data collaboration with the Zeeland Healthcare Coalition

Zeeland is a frontrunner in terms of aging population, staff shortages and the associated problems surrounding the accessibility, quality and affordability of healthcare. This effect is further amplified by the low population density and island structure of Zeeland. It is often said that the healthcare situation in Zeeland is thus 10 years ahead of that in the rest of the Netherlands.

But fortunately, Zeeland is also leading in terms of regional cooperation and the willingness to tackle this problem jointly. In 2020, the Zeeland Healthcare Coalition was founded by collaborating Zeeland healthcare providers, together with health insurer CZ, and has now grown into a collaboration of 62 parties. They find common ground in the conviction that the predicted healthcare gap in Zeeland can only be prevented by looking beyond the boundaries of one’s own organization and developing joint solutions.

An important precondition for this collaboration is having current and accurate insight across the silos of healthcare: What problems occur in which groups and in which areas? What causes these problems? Which solutions prove effective, and why? And what is the effect of a change at one healthcare organization on other parties in the region?

Based on this insight, the collaborating parties can jointly develop, apply, monitor and adjust the right policies and solutions. We call this a learning healthcare system. Without these insights, the parties in Zeeland would not be able to implement coherent improvements, but would remain optimizing within the boundaries of their own organization. That is not sufficient to solve the looming healthcare gap.

The foundation of a learning healthcare system is the structural analysis of data from many different parties, because each party has data from a different piece of the puzzle. This almost always involves sensitive medical data. Security and privacy are therefore crucial.

The Zeeland Healthcare Coalition therefore looks at Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) from its inception as a means to set up this joint data analysis in a structural, secure and privacy-by-design manner.

As a first concrete step in this, the Zeeland Healthcare Coalition has selected Linksight to demonstrate that a regional privacy-by-design analysis network can be set up via MPC to generate the insights needed to keep healthcare accessible in Zeeland. The focus here is on acute care and elderly care.