Case Study: Netherlands' National IT Institute for Healthcare (NICTIZ) achieves rapid, scalable national EHR deployment with InterSystems Ensemble

Netherlands Counts on Ensemble as Core Technology for its National Electronic Health Record

The Netherlands’ National IT Institute for Healthcare (NICTIZ) set out to build a nationwide electronic health record infrastructure that would let providers securely share patient information, improve care and reduce costs. The core challenge was creating the National SwitchPoint (NSP)—a central index and registry that handles authentication, authorization and auditing—while meeting strict performance, scalability and standards requirements (HL7 v3) for very high message volumes.

System integrator CSC selected InterSystems Ensemble as the NSP’s core technology and delivered the system in four months. Ensemble’s rapid development tools, HL7 v3 support, “virtual documents” for high‑performance XML processing, automatic message persistence, web-based management and scalable object database enabled near-linear CPU scalability and the capacity to handle the anticipated load of more than 4 billion messages per year (≈20 TB). The result was a fast, manageable, and cost-effective national platform.

Netherlands' National IT Institute for Healthcare (NICTIZ)

Bob Schat

Solution Architect, CSC