Dutch Public Health Care Overhaul Benefits Open Source Adoption

Contributed by Jeannot Bos

The Dutch federal government completed a major overhaul last year of its public health care and services systems. In the overhaul, many of the organizational responsibilities of national systems were assigned to local providers. To handle the demands of myriad new responsibilities, many local governments had to build or implement new solutions. 

The transition from federal to localized control of the healthcare system opened up new opportunities for the adoption of open source software. As the transition was occurring, the government of Netherlands adopted legislation known as the Open Standards and Open Source Software (OSOSS) Programme, which call for all levels of government to adopt open source software where possible. New healthcare applications reflect this preference. 

EnterpriseDB (EDB) works with a number of software developers involved with Dutch government IT projects and was a beneficiary of the new open source initiative.  For example, EDB has played a role with the following providers: 

• Topicus develops open source solutions for healthcare, including a widely used centralized platform that allows citizens to manage their health care services. Topicus has built a platform called TOP, which stands for Topicus Government Platform. This platform functions as a hub where all government healthcare organisations can collaborate, as well as a portal for citizens to manage their health care services. TOP is being used by more than 60 municipalities throughout the country.
• PinkRoccade Local Government has developed an open source, cloud-based solution specifically for governments called the Pink Private Cloud. More than 40 local and national government agencies in the Netherlands have linked applications to this hosted platform in order to share information. 

Public services are increasingly implementing solutions based on open source software, as they offer governments and taxpayers the most cost-efficient choice for available budgets. With EDB actively involved in the Netherlands, it’s clear the Postgres is well on its way to becoming the standard open-source database management system for government use. 

For information on how EDB Postgres can support your open source initiative, contact us.