Access to Funding

Minister Schippers launches smart ‘Health Deals’

Edith Schippers, Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport, officially launched the start of ‘Health Deals’ on 16 November. She did this on her own behalf and that of her colleague Henk Kamp (Minister of Economic Affairs) by opening a digital helpdesk for information about and support with the start-up of these healthcare projects. A Health Deal is a new form of collaboration between public and private parties that enables innovative and cost-saving healthcare innovations to be realised and made broadly applicable. Schippers symbolically opened the digital helpdesk at rvo.nl during the FME Annual Event in Utrecht. 

To qualify as a Health Deal, the intended innovation – whether it is a technological or a social innovation or combination – must have a clear benefit for the patient and save costs. For patients, this means a health benefit or an improvement in their quality of life or the control over their lives. It is also vital that the innovation results in existing, outdated applications no longer being used. After all, innovations are only cost effective once they fully replace something and are not merely added to existing options.


Another condition is that users and patients be clearly involved in the development: in collaboration with industry, the initiative must lie with them and therefore the approach must be bottom up. The government can subsequently encourage the development, for example by solving bottlenecks in legislation and by reducing the administrative burden.


The concept of Health Deals has been developed especially for healthcare innovations that are currently struggling to get beyond the pilot or start-up phases, or that are only used locally (in a single region, hospital or institution). Bringing together users, patients and experts from different disciplines (such as lawyers, economists, privacy experts, system experts) in a Health Deal allows issues to be tackled quickly, and that can lead to a broader application within the Netherlands.

‘A good Health Deal is attractive to everybody: patients, care providers and companies, but also to those paying healthcare insurance premiums,’ said Schippers in Utrecht. ‘With this innovative approach, we are improving healthcare while keeping it affordable.’

For further information, please contact the Netherlands Enterprise Agency.

With effect from 2015, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has changed the regulations for the TKI allowance. As a result of these changes many charitable organisations (Dutch ANBI status) are able to apply for TKI funding. In recent months many of the Dutch Health Foundations have registered for the TKI allowance and have acquired almost 15 million euros in funding for new public-private partnerships in 2016. The Top Sector LSH is delighted that this amount has become available and would like to thank all of the organisations that have contributed to this result.

The Top Sector's executive office is responsible for allocating the TKI allowance. New innovative R&D projects will be started in close collaboration with public and private partners and the health foundations. The specific rules for the TKI allowance can be found on our website.

Tom Oostrom, chairman of the Association of Dutch Health Foundations (SGF) encourages all SMEs in the LSH sector to come up with good ideas for future joint research proposals.

Visit the Health~Holland website to read more about the TKI allowance and to download the application form.

Biobanks are valuable resources for health research. BBMRI-NL, the Topsector LSH connected research infrastructure for biobanks in the Netherlands, continuously wants to improve biobank facilities, add new features to it and demonstrate its value to the research community as well as the general public. We don’t want to do this alone, but want to involve you. That is why we have decided to ask you to start thinking about biobanks, and about how you could contribute to better visibility for biobanks, or to better collaboration between biobanks and other disciplines. There's something in it for you, too: up to € 20,000 to € 40,000 to work out your idea.

Visit the BBMRI-NL website for more information.

Through the Regional Investment Funds, the Dutch government stimulates the development of public-private partnerships between entrepreneurs, vocational schools and (local) government. The main objective is to improve the connection between vocational education and the regional labor market. Good and up-to-date vocational education plays a crucial role for the innovative capacity of the region.

The deadline of the next period for submitting grant applications is 31st of Januari 2016. New in this period of application is the possibility to include development of an Associate Degree (AD) program and the assignment of an applied research lector.

Visit the website for more information on the Regional Investment Funds for vocational education (mbo). 

For more information about starting a public-private partnership in this contact please contact Miriam Korstanje of Platform Beta Techniek.