Philips Virtual Acute Care (VAC) – Telemonitoring at Rijnstate
Philips partnered with Rijnstate Hospital to pilot Virtual Acute Care (VAC), a cloud-based telehealth solution designed to streamline remote patient monitoring. The goal: create a unified overview of patient notifications across multiple telemonitoring systems, to improve efficiency, and support upscaling telemonitoring.
The pilot launched in April 2025 after rigorous design, workflow mapping, and compliance checks. VAC delivered secure data handling, prioritized notifications, and role-based access, meeting key technical requirements. However, integration challenges and limited workflow efficiency negatively impacted use and adoption. User satisfaction remained low, and expected benefits—such as improved efficiency and error reduction—were not fully realized.
Despite these hurdles, the project provided valuable insights: early stakeholder involvement and alignment, robust workflow mapping, and direct user-developer interaction are critical for success. While VAC will not continue and scale in Rijnstate, Philips will leverage these lessons to drive innovations.
Healthcare Challenge and Digital Solution
The pilot project addressed a pressing issue in hospital care: fragmented telemonitoring workflows. At Rijnstate’s Virtual Care Center (VCC), nurses use multiple telemonitoring systems. A unified overview can improve efficiency, a lower risk of missed alerts, and can be beneficial for upscaling telemonitoring.
To address this challenge, Philips introduced Virtual Acute Care (VAC), a cloud-based telehealth platform designed to provide a unified patient dashboard, prioritize alerts, and streamline workflows. The solution was co-created through interactive workshops, workflow mapping, and mock-up design sessions, ensuring alignment between stakeholders from Philips and Rijnstate. Despite several technical successes—such as GDPR compliance and integration with Luscii and Guardian—the pilot revealed challenges regarding stability, user adoption and integration complexity. While VAC will not scale further, the project delivered valuable lessons: early stakeholder engagement, iterative design, and breaking silos are critical for developing and implementing digital health innovations.
Philips and Rijnstate ran the pilot from April to October 2025, following extensive co-creation workshops, workflow mapping, and compliance checks. VAC successfully met key technical requirements, including GDPR compliance, ISO standards, and secure data handling. It integrated with two telemonitoring systems (Luscii and Guardian) and delivered features such as prioritized alerts, role-based access, and patient filtering.
Key insights: While the technologic concept worked, the implementation was not stable enough to build trust and adoption challenges emerged. Efficiency gains with an unstable system are marginal, and user satisfaction scores averaged 2–3/10, signaling the need for deeper workflow alignment and stakeholder engagement to shape the changes in architecture, features and user interface. Legal aspects around certification and integration third-party vendors proved more complex than anticipated, delaying timelines.
Lessons learned and future plans:
- Early clinical involvement and workflow mapping are critical.
- Direct user-developer interaction drives relevance.
- Regulatory compliance and integration planning must start early.
While the Philips Virtual Acute Care (VAC) pilot at Rijnstate will not continue or scale further, the insights gained are shaping Philips’ next steps. Philips is committed to leveraging these learnings—workflow alignment, user-centric design, and seamless integration—to develop telehealth solutions that truly enhance efficiency and collaboration. Our focus is on creating scalable, interoperable platforms that deliver measurable value for clinicians and patients, ensuring digital health becomes a cornerstone of high-quality, connected care. Our learnings resulted in the newly introduced customer advisory board where customers are influencing our roadmap and development direction. In addition, the customers are directly adding input on the user interface/feature design.
Disclaimer: HealthChain project is funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
