Innovating healthcare: Zuyderland Medical Center elevates a community

Zuyderland Medical Center is a major healthcare provider of hospital care, elderly care, home care, and mental health care. It is located in the southern Province of Limburg in the Netherlands. In this region, the challenges facing healthcare come together in an intensified way. The population is ageing faster than in the rest of the Netherlands, with a rapidly growing share of people over 80. Even so, the average life expectancy in this region is shorter with people spending more years in poorer health. 

Like other leaders in its field, Zuyderland MC is facing significant pressures in terms of managing costs, care delivery and a shrinking workforce (half of current employees are due to retire over the next 10 years). To overcome these pressures, Zuyderland MC works with KPMG Netherlands to explore new opportunities with digital transformation—not simply to modernize its IT but to reimagine how healthcare can be delivered. 

Key stats 

• Delivered smarter, more resilient, patient‑centered care 
• Streamlined clinical documentation, reducing workload 
• Decommissioned 35% of applications, achieving an integrated system 

How client transformation became a healthcare imperative  

Fragmented systems and growing care pressures 

The aging Dutch population has increased the demand for complex care, placing sustained pressure on costs and capacity across the healthcare system. Meanwhile, the workforce is shrinking as practitioners retire and nurses quit to escape the excessive administrative burden. The fragmented IT landscape of siloed systems, limited interoperability and legacy infrastructure has become an added complication—unable to support the data-driven, integrated delivery required for modern healthcare.   

The impact of these interlinked pressures has made it difficult to deliver efficient, coordinated care, with data not fully accessible or integrated. In 2020, a two-day IT outage highlighted the fragility of its existing infrastructure, with cancelled appointments and surgeries. This moment reinforced the need for a more resilient digital foundation.  

Building a cloud-first foundation for healthcare innovation  

Zuyderland MC made the bold decision to move fully to the cloud as a key step in modernizing its entire digital infrastructure. Working together with Microsoft, the KPMG team helped shape and deliver this transformation. This was an end-to-end commitment: helping define cloud strategy and architecture, building the business case and transformation roadmap, and leading program management and governance.   

At the core of this approach was the migration of the Center’s electronic health record system (HiX from ChipSoft) and key applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud, ensuring a secure, stable, and scalable digital foundation. In parallel, Zuyderland is building a cloud-based data platform using Microsoft Fabric to enable advanced data-driven use cases. 

The process was not linear. It required close collaboration and resilience across all partners. This quickly became a shared journey that helped build deep trust while laying the foundation for the next phase of transformation.  

Bringing technology and care transformation together  

One of KPMG’s key roles was to help ensure the technology investment directly enabled better care delivery, support the required shift to hybrid and remote care models, and empower patients with greater control over their health records.  

Our current focus is applying AI to everyday healthcare delivery — a lot easier with the strong digital foundation already in place at Zuyderland MC. Central to this is a strategic partnership between Zuyderland, Microsoft and KPMG to establish an AI Center of Excellence, identifying care pressure points and how AI can help reduce them.   

This implementation of AI solutions is designed not to replace clinicians, but support them, greatly closing the gap between rising demand and limited resources. A good example of this is the development of an AI-powered ‘digital nurse’, a 24/7 service that supports patients directly at the bedside with practical information and general questions, reducing the number of routine inquiries directed to nursing staff. By taking over these basic information tasks, the AI Avatar helps relieve pressure on nurses, allowing them to focus more on personal care and medical treatments.  

A scalable platform for continuous innovation 

Zuyderland now operates on a modern, cloud-based digital foundation with seamless data exchange to healthcare standards. This has extended capabilities and improved outcomes in areas such as location-independent care and hybrid care pathways. 

What sets the transformation apart is not just the innovative technology involved, but the collaboration behind it. Zuyderland, KPMG and Microsoft combine real-world healthcare expertise, end-to-end transformation experience, and advanced cloud and AI technologies to create the foundation for healthcare innovation. 

The collaboration is also contributing to broader ecosystems — including European hospital networks working together to develop and scale responsible AI in healthcare. 

Looking ahead, Zuyderland will be working with KPMG to explore:  

• Scaling AI across clinical and operational workflows  
• Expanding the AI Center of Excellence, launched in April 2026 
• Accelerating AI use cases embedded in day-to-day hospital care, elderly care, home care, and mental health care Implementing  new applications such as Microsoft Dragon Copilot, to streamline clinical documentation and reduce administrative workload 
• Continuing to close the healthcare capacity gap  

We have supported Zuyderland across the full transformation lifecycle to date. This has encompassed strategic roadmapping for logical right-place right-time implementation, through to implementation of new tools and technologies.   

At the heart of this project has been a deep and trusted collaboration, to deliver large-scale cloud migration, establish a unified data and AI platform, and build a modern healthcare workplace and operating model.  

This is a transformation that has gone beyond system change. It has enabled Zuyderland to deliver smarter, more resilient and patient-centered care. And, with an innovative collaboration underpinning it, there are plenty more opportunities to realize.   

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