HealthchainStories
Beterdichbij Collega: Enabling secure professional collaboration beyond hospital walls
The need
The project addressed the fragmentation and inefficiency of communication between hospital specialists and primary care partners (such as home care organizations) regarding shared patients.
Previously, healthcare professionals lacked a secure, asynchronous digital tool to easily discuss complex cases from within their own workflows, leading to coordination gaps in regional care pathways.
The HealthChain Support
HealthChain supported Healthcare Organisations in identifying their innovation challenges and selecting companies to address them. They worked closely as an interregional team to co-create, test, and validate a solution aligned with real clinical workflows, patient needs, and organisational constraints. The project provided financial and business support to boost the solution’s market-readiness and commercialisation.
The
Solution
BeterDichtbij Collega is an integrated communication platform that enables easy, secure online contact between healthcare professionals across different types of organizations.
It allows professionals to communicate asynchronously about specific patients or cases directly from their Electronic Health Record (EHR) or online, facilitating more efficient regional collaboration and multidisciplinary care.
The solution transforms BeterDichtbij from a patient-provider tool into an essential “professional-to-professional” infrastructure. Its unique value lies in its seamless integration with existing hospital workflows and EHRs, allowing specialists and primary care providers to collaborate securely without the need for synchronized schedules or insecure third-party apps like WhatsApp.
Impact
The platform facilitates easy online contact between HCPs in different types of organizations, allowing them to ask questions about specific patient situations or clarify measurements.
By providing an asynchronous digital communication channel (messaging and video calls), it reduces the difficulty specialists often face when trying to contact primary care physicians during busy clinical hours.
It allows professionals to discuss mutual patients directly from their own Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, fostering a more coordinated and integrated care model.
Outcomes
- Improved Collaboration: The pilot successfully improved regional collaboration for wound care teams between Rijnstate hospital and four home care organizations.
- Enhanced Communication: +120 messages in +20 conversations among healthcare professionals.
- Increased Specialist Expertise: 12 key users were trained on the use of Betterdichbij to seamless communicate with each other.
- Sustained Usage: Although the official HealthChain pilot ended in September 2025, users found enough value in the tool to continue using it while waiting for a formal regional decision on long-term adoption
Sustainability
The solution is built on cloud infrastructure to ensure it can handle increased user activity and operational reliability as it scales to new regions.
BeterDichtbij Collega is positioned as a niche, user-friendly alternative to international platforms like WhatsApp or Microsoft Teams, specifically tailored for healthcare-compliant communication within the Netherlands.
To ensure sustained usage, the strategy includes offering comprehensive training and support to facilitate seamless integration into existing hospital workflows, thereby fostering long-term relationships with healthcare institutions.
The plan involves direct engagement with hospitals to customize the solution to their specific needs, increasing the likelihood of long-term adoption beyond the initial pilot phase.
Testimonials
