Vision: AI and technology make people more important.

The unsustainable labour market context

The urgency for this technological shift is underscored by the latest 2026 ZorgRating benchmark (Platform DAAN). The data reveals a deeply paradoxical and ultimately unsustainable trend within the Dutch healthcare labour market. While revenue development is growing steadily across all major sectors – including mental health, disability care, elderly care, and hospitals – the workforce is bearing an increasing burden. Sick leave rates remain stubbornly high, averaging nearly 8% and approaching 10% in elderly care. Concurrently, both vacancy rates and the reliance on temporary agency staff are dropping significantly.

This divergence, rather than signalling the resolution of the capacity crisis, suggests organisations are limiting hiring and capping flexible staffing even as revenues increase. And, while “scarcity may breed sharpness”, staff turnover and sick leave are rising because the existing workforce is burdened with absorbing growing patient demand. In this situation, implementing AI and remote monitoring is no longer just an innovation strategy; it’s a crucial operational necessity to ease the overwhelming workload on staff and prevent widespread burnout.

From hospital to home

Care is shifting from the hospital to the home environment and the local community. Continuous monitoring and digital health predictors enable prevention and early intervention, whilst allowing patients to recover in their own surroundings. This reduces the physical and mental burden on patients and frees up hospital capacity for complex care. Consequently, physical hospitals will become smaller and more highly specialised; care itself will become more personal, closer to home, and more accessible.

St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein now has fewer nurses per patient, with one nurse for every five patients instead of four, for instance. A key change is allowing family members to help with simple tasks like changing beds or assisting with meals. They can also help patients move around, such as disconnecting oxygen for a short walk.

However, the hospital at home may put a burden on informal caregivers, 3 million of whom are finding it difficult to combine work and care (SCP-rapport ‘Mantelzorg versterken met het oog op de toekomst’ (2026)). Some even stop working. Therefore, traditional HR policies alone are not enough. The employer of today adopts a caregiver-friendly approach. This means flexible working hours, hybrid working, and assistance from internal care coaches. They help employees with care and arrangements. This way, employees can continue to focus on their work.

The healthcare professional as director

The key success factor in this transformation is the healthcare professional. MedTech must create space for human attention – for conversation, building trust, and delivering tailored care. This requires practitioners to be co-designers of their workflows, not merely end-users. They must retain control over which technologies are deployed and how.

Simultaneously, their expertise is evolving: as algorithms take over routine tasks such as pattern recognition, the nature of medical expertise shifts. Organisations need to consider which skills will grow more vital and which knowledge might fade. The aim is not to “automate every step of a broken process,” but to reshape workflows across the health ecosystem by linking clinical, financial, and research data with analytics and AI, avoiding a “rip and replace” of current hospital IT systems.

Moreover, the pressure on informal caregivers offers the AI and MedTech sectors numerous opportunities. There is a need for assistance with care coordination, temporary relief, and improved links between care requirements and supply. Smart technology can aid in this. Think of AI platforms that connect informal caregivers, neighbours, and professional support. Technology from the Smart Industry can alleviate the burden on informal caregivers through, for instance, robotics and home automation (such as fall detection or assistance with household tasks). There is also a demand for user-friendly software for care plans. By using AI to reduce administration and viewing informal caregivers as partners, we can develop solutions that enhance care.

Need for strategic independence

The evolution of healthcare organisations means they are inadvertently becoming dependent on a limited number of international technology corporations. The unauthorised use of frictionless applications by professionals frequently results in patient data being stored on servers outside the EU, for instance. Concurrently, without proactive local initiatives, there is a risk that major tech firms will dominate the healthcare infrastructure. This touches upon privacy, but more importantly, digital sovereignty, democratic values, and equitable access to care. A consciously managed data architecture, AI governance and European collaboration are therefore essential.

Prerequisites for scaling

The implementation of medical technology faces three structural pitfalls:

1. Treating it as a purely technical project. Innovation is primarily a change management issue; securing buy-in from the frontline is paramount.
2. Assuming technology is inherently progressive. Innovation must always originate from an operational problem, not from the technology itself.
3. The ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome. Local pilots often remain local. Scaling requires the courage to embrace each other’s solutions and jointly develop standards.

Furthermore, the quality of underlying data is a critical prerequisite. AI can only fulfil its promise if the foundational data is robust. MedTech is not a panacea; legislation, behavioural change, and a shift towards prevention must be addressed concurrently.

In conclusion

See: The moonshot: a tenfold productivity growth in healthcare by 2050

Based on research into macroeconomic and healthcare projections from Dutch institutes like the CPB (Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis) and the RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), here is a detailed breakdown of the productivity growth required by 2050, and how it contrasts with the “tenfold” claim.

1. Clarifying the “tenfold” (10x) claim

The statement about a “tenfold productivity growth by 2050” is not a literal econometric forecast from the CPB or RIVM. Rather, it is a specific, rhetorical “moonshot” ambition formulated by the Ziekenhuis van de Toekomst (Hospital of the Future) programme, a collaboration between the University of Twente’s TechMed Centre, Medisch Spectrum Twente, and the tech employers’ organisation FME: Landelijke impuls voor Ziekenhuizen van de Toekomst utwente, Ziekenhuis van de Toekomst utwente.

Its purpose is strategic provocation: to emphasise that incremental improvements (e.g., making a process 5% faster) are mathematically insufficient to close the widening gap between care demand and labour supply. Only radical, non-linear innovation can even begin to approach such a scale of efficiency.

2. The macro reality: the supply-demand gap

To understand the actual required productivity growth, we must look at the baseline projections:

• Surging demand to care: Due to population ageing and the rise of chronic conditions, collective healthcare expenditures are projected to rise from approximately 11% of GDP today to over 18% by 2060 Antwoorden op vragen begrotingsbehandeling VWS 2022/2023.
• Stagnating supply of staff: The working-age population is shrinking. Projections warn that if current care delivery models persist without significant productivity gains, 25% of the entire Dutch workforce would need to be employed in healthcare by 2040, up from roughly 14% (1 in 7) today Miljoenennota. This is demographically and economically impossible.

3. The required productivity growth

Historically, healthcare has suffered from the “Baumol effect”: it is a highly labour-intensive sector where productivity growth has consistently lagged behind the broader economy. In fact, over the past decade, labour productivity in Dutch healthcare has occasionally declined by 1% to 3% due to increasing administrative burdens and the growing complexity of care Het tekort aan medewerkers in de zorg.

To prevent the unsustainable “1 in 4 workers” scenario, macroeconomic models indicate that the healthcare sector must achieve a sustained, structural annual labour productivity growth of 1.5% to 2.5% Bevolkingsgroei en vergrijzing VNG, Langetermijn arbeidsproductiviteit CPB.

• The compounding effect: While 1.5%–2.5% per year sounds modest, compounding this over 25 years (2025–2050) results in a total productivity increase of roughly 45% to 85%, not 1000% (tenfold).
• Achieving even this 1.5%–2.5% annual target requires a fundamental break from historical trends. It cannot be achieved by simply asking staff to work harder or faster.

4. How this growth must be calculated and achieved

Closing the gap requires redefining “productivity” in healthcare. It is not about treating more patients per hour at the expense of quality. According to the RIVM and CPB, the required productivity growth must be realised through:

1. Substitution and task shifting: Deploying AI and robotics to automate routine, low-value tasks (e.g., administrative documentation, basic pattern recognition in diagnostics), freeing up highly trained professionals for complex, high-value care Zorg voor de toekomst SER.
2. Care migration (Hospital to Home): Shifting care from expensive, capacity-constrained hospital settings to remote monitoring and home-based care. This reduces costly bed days and prevents avoidable admissions, effectively increasing the “output” per euro and per staff member Toekomstverkenning zorguitgaven 2015-2060 RIVM.
3. Prevention and early intervention: Using digital health predictors to intervene earlier, preventing minor issues from escalating into resource-intensive chronic or acute conditions Zorg en sociaal domein RIVM.

Summary

The “tenfold” figure is a visionary benchmark used to spur radical innovation. The actual calculated requirement to keep the system viable is a sustained annual productivity growth of 1.5% to 2.5%, compounding to a ~60–80% total increase by 2050. While this is far less than “tenfold”, achieving it is still considered one of the greatest economic and operational challenges of our time, precisely because it requires overcoming decades of stagnant productivity in the sector.