THE FIFTH CONFERENCE HEALTH - Belgian perspectives on how to improve healthcare
to sustainable partnerships with domain specialised product and implementation partners. Reform and openness are in my opinion absolutely critical in order to be able to respond to the rapid evolution in the care sector.” Lemmens sees several trends that are currently shaping the healthcare market in Belgium, and is convinced that only those suppliers who are able to evolve with the market have any chance of playing a sustainable role. Firstly there is the current consolidation trend in the healthcare sector: “As hospitals are collaborating and merging, I suspect that we’ll end up with about ten groups in the Belgian market that can make decisions autonomously. This consolidation sounds bad, but the good part of the story is that this results in a much bigger scale of spending, which is very welcome because we have a lot to catch up on.” Secondly the sector is facing a tremendous crisis caused by the increasingly pressing shortage of personnel—nurses and specialists in particular. According to Lemmens, ICT will be essential to keep care in Belgium affordable and to cope with the increasing scarcity of people resources: “Awareness of ICT’s benefits took some time due to complex hierarchies and older personnel, but newer generations of doctors and managers in healthcare are all the more conscious of the needs and opportunities. However, the key challenge is that most institutions don’t have the budget to invest as needed in ICT. I therefore hope that the current major consolidation wave in the sector will improve economies of scale and reduce costs to tackle the lack of budget.” These challenges notwithstanding, Lemmens sees a lot of opportunities in the healthcare market. “The financial administration has already been computerised, but in the logistical processes there are still big opportunities to iron out inefficiencies and costs, e.g. in buying products, screening suppliers, managing stock, and so on. Pharmacies amount to 70 percent of the turnover of this logistical flow, and in most hospitals this has not yet been integrated. In the future we will also focus on front office solutions, supporting the doctors. For this purpose, we purchased the clinical information system of UZ Brussels, which we are bringing on the Belgian care market under the name Clinical Power Station since September 2010.” A third trend in the care sector is the evolution of a specific Belgian context towards a European context. Partezis is anticipating this development. Lemmens explains; “The solutions that we are offering today will also remain deployable when the Belgian care sector is further regulated within a European framework. Furthermore, the European integration obviously offers a huge opportunity in terms of scale expansion. And that will benefit us all.”
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++ Partezis is the knowledge partner of the Belgian healthcare market in the ICT domain. From a single integrated solution the company computerises processes in more than 50 hospitals and more than 200 nursing homes. ++ www.partezis.be
The Fifth Conference with