In each edition of our alumni newsletter, we speak with one of our alumni about their time as a student at Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management (previously iBMG and SAG) and what they are doing now.
This time, we spoke with Ananta Sotthewes. In 2008, she graduated from the bachelor BMG, Gezondheidswetenschappen and in 2010 she also passed the Healthcare Management (ZoMa) course. Since 2021, she has been working at Nictiz as Product Manager. She is also Secretary of Nictiz’ Works Council.
What made you choose the bachelor’s degree BMG, followed by the master’s ZoMa?
When choosing a course, I specifically wanted something different from the choices my people around me suggested or chose, such as law, medicine or business administration. How cool was it that Health Sciences gave so much diversity and was like the business operations of healthcare! I already had an affinity for the healthcare sector during high school and was good at economics. So it was exactly the combination I was looking for. To this day, I am still happy with the direction I chose!
How did your career progress (during and) after graduation?
In my second bachelor year, I was introduced early to working in healthcare through a parttime job in a hospital. Instead of solving registration errors, I found collaboration between management and healthcare professionals more interesting. In my third study year, I did an internship in another hospital, where I got talking to the department that dealt with data quality. During my master’s, I worked full-time at the hospital. After my master’s, I worked in data quality consultancy for almost ten years.
For fifteen years now, I have been a knowledge partner to, among others, healthcare institutions, health insurers, IT suppliers, industry organisations and the Ministry of VWS on strategy and vision for digital data exchange and data quality.
And what does your current work entail?
In recent years, I have been working at Nictiz to make more impact nationwide and work towards a sustainable healthcare information system through data reuse. As a citizen, you deal with multiple, different healthcare providers. The big question here is how data ends up in the right place in the right system, so that everyone can access and understand the data. Nowadays, healthcare providers exchange a lot of data within healthcare domains or healthcare institutions. The challenge is how to reuse this data in their own work process within the entire healthcare network. Standardisation is the solution here. The core of standardisation is a uniform language. Within Nictiz, we call this Unity of Language and Unity of Technology. What data do you exchange and which exchange standard do you use?
In your experience, has the healthcare landscape changed much since you graduated?
We are tilting more towards network care, where you need care information at different times. For this, it is important that we cooperate more, trust and lean on each other instead of competing as the system has been set up in recent years. We often assume a person visits an institution, with the institution collecting data for a specific situation. Then the person leaves the institution. We need to turn that around: a healthcare institution briefly visits the citizen’s life. Then you use the information in the network for this person, using a unified language. We need to put the person at the centre of all aspects that can have an impact on health. Citizens should be able to participate in deciding on healthcare appropriate to them and have all the information available to be able to do so.
How do you look back on your time at ESHPM? What has stayed with you?
I found working together in groups incredibly instructive, especially during my master’s. Partly because many fellow students also combined their studies with working. Exchanging practical experiences in healthcare was hugely enriching. The power of different perspectives when working together was instructive; when do you compromise and when do you remain firm.
In conversation with... you?
Do you have fond memories of your time at SAG/iBMG/ESHPM that you’d like to share with your fellow alumni? If so, please contact us at alumni@eshpm.eur.nl.
