Stichting Huistartsen Laboratorium in Etten-Leur (Netherlands) - delivering support to care givers in primary care - and VitalHealth software – delivering disease management software for integrated care networks – have entered into a cooperation agreement.

SHL has since long supported family practice physicians with e.g. care for chronic disease patients. Currently, SHL is involved with 10 regional diabetes care groups involving about 400 physicians and roughly 30,000 patients. SHL provides diagnostics services (lab work and fundus photos) as well as several other facilitating services. Amongst these are the collection of data for outcomes reporting, providing mirror and benchmark information and the processing of payments. SHL’s service enables physicians to focus on working with their Information System, while SHL extracts the required information from these systems.

The cooperation between SHL and VitalHealth initially focuses on further optimizing SHL’s existing IT infrastructure, to enable additional automation and optimization of data collection. Next to that, the physicians will be offered the option to migrate to a more robust solution for integrated care networks (ICN), including protocol based care, task delegation, referrals within the network and patient self-management. Integration with existing systems will be supported, fully retaining historical data collected to date.