Sylvia van Laar

Sylvia van Laar is a senior policy officer semantic interoperability at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in The Netherlands. Her current work focusses on the European Electronic Health Record exchange Format, and a strategy for IDMP (Identification of Medicinal Products). She has a background as pharmacist and obtained a PhD with real-world data research.

From a European perspective, what is the most urgent challenge health systems must solve right now when it comes to semantic interoperability?

• The most urgent challenge is to choose and use only one terminology standard for data exchange as much as possible to build a sustainable and reliable European health data system. However, choosing one means losing others, and that might hurt. – Sylvia van Laar