Karlien Hollanders
Karlien is a trained healthcare provider herself (pharmacist), has worked in IT within healthcare (Corilus & LynxCare) but above all she’s an experienced Patient Expert as a family caregiver of a seriously ill daughter. Traveling between different hospitals and primary caregivers, brought to light the difficulties in sharing medical data between different healthcare providers. Today, she shares these experiences with a wide audience to help create better patient-centered care. 2 years ago, she also started working as a consultant for the Belgian federal government where she’s working on improving the accessibility to a patient’s medical record for both patients and healthcare providers.
Is there a patient, situation, or experience that changed the way you see things?
– My daughter has a rare condition, primary hyperoxaluria type 1. As a result, she had to be treated in different hospitals during the first 3 years of her life. Throughout this period, I found that my level of education, bilingualism and ability to stop working and transport her to these treatments were vital. If I had not been continuously by her side to act as a walking medical record, she would not be alive today.
– What do you hope people will walk away with after your talk?
Understanding the importance of sharing medical data. Multidisciplinary collaboration is key to patient-centred care. This requires usable and interoperable data.
– What excites or motivates you right now in digital health?
Standards are needed to make data interoperable. But AI also offers very interesting opportunities, e.g. to create summaries of medical histories or process unstructured data. This makes what seemed impossible suddenly possible
– Is there something in this field that frustrates or challenges you. And why?
You need to convince all players within the ecosystem of the importance of data sharing and patient-centricity. And often their current business models don’t facilitate this. Having to constantly point out the importance of patient wellbeing can be exhausting, but it is necessary, because in the end it will make things more beneficial for everyone.