A quiet but decisive shift took place in the Dutch healthcare landscape last year. After a streak of competitive wins in the Netherlands—beating tenders, market consultations, direct negotiations and head-to-head innovation competitions—Neolook’s work in neonatal and paediatric intensive care caught the attention of hospitals across the country. That momentum did not stop at clinical recognition. It expanded into something larger: acknowledgement by the national insurer collective and an invitation to help shape a country-wide innovation model. What started as a series of project victories crystallised into a national movement to redesign how critically ill newborns and children will receive care in the coming decade.
In the months following the early successes, NICUs and PICUs across the Netherlands began reaching out. They recognised that Neolook’s solutions—built together with frontline nurses, validated in real units, and proven in competitive innovation rounds—were more than isolated tools. They were early building blocks of a future system. As hospitals engaged, the Dutch insurers took notice. Represented through the national collective of healthcare insurers, they reached a conclusion of their own: the ambitions set out in the NFU neonatal-paediatric vision could not be realised without a temporary innovation partner capable of building, testing and scaling digital care across all centres.
It was the insurers, not Neolook, who proposed the next step. They invited all 16 NICU and PICU departments—together with Neolook as an innovation partner—into a public-private collaboration. The goal was not merely technical. It was to explore, design and articulate the governance model required for nationwide transformation.
Behind this invitation sat a stark reality. Dutch NICUs and PICUs have operated above the safe occupancy threshold for years: consistently above 90%, where the standard should be around 80%. Patient volumes continue to rise; staffing continues to fall. Growth in demand, without structural change, places the entire system at risk.
Hospitals and insurers saw the same dilemma. They could continue with the status quo, accepting rising shortages, delayed care, and widening inequalities. They could choose fragmented regional autonomy—each department protecting its own processes, data and priorities. Or they could attempt something unprecedented: a shared, virtual IZA-aligned model where data availability, joint innovation tracks and scalable digital workflows would lift the entire national system at once.
The third path required not only technology, but a governance structure that all centres would trust. And so began the journey.
On 8 June 2023, the final signature arrived. All 16 NICUs and PICUs formally agreed to establish a national governance structure for their joint initiative. This alignment was more than operational. It marked the moment when the country’s most specialised departments committed to moving beyond individual practice and toward a shared national framework.
The agreement created the foundation for stronger data-sharing, clearer ethical and legal safeguards, unified innovation priorities and coordinated implementation. It also opened the door to joint medical research, shared outcome monitoring and scalable adoption pathways for innovations that would otherwise remain trapped in local pilots.
Insurers and hospitals recognised that building this governance would require a neutral, innovative party capable of translating clinical needs into operational tools. Neolook’s role became that of a temporary accelerator inside the public-private collaboration: helping articulate workflows, piloting models that span institutions, ensuring that new digital pathways meet MDR-grade requirements, and co-creating the structure that could eventually stand independently of any single vendor
The purpose was not to build dependence. It was to build momentum.
This collaboration—hospitals, insurers and an innovation partner working as one ecosystem—is more than a project. It signals a shift in how the Netherlands intends to safeguard accessibility in critical care. By anchoring innovation at the national level and connecting it to real workload pressures, workforce scarcity and rising clinical demand, the country is deliberately choosing a path that prevents inequalities rather than reacts to them.
It marks the beginning of a care model where data is shared securely, workflows are aligned across centres, and innovations can scale because the system is designed to support scaling from the start.
What began with hospital-side innovation is now a national movement with structural ambitions. By teaming up across 16 departments, collaborating with insurers, and integrating Neolook’s digital innovation engine, the Netherlands has set in motion a transformational infrastructure. It aims to protect access, ensure continuity of care, and give every critically ill newborn and child—regardless of geography, circumstances or staffing fluctuations—the same chance at the best possible outcome.
The work ahead is complex, but the direction is clear. A new model of neonatal and paediatric intensive care is being built, not by one party, but by the entire system working as one.