“I see this as a truly innovative, entrepreneurial partnership. It fills a gap in the market, and therefore also in NEXUS Nederland’s offering.”
— Peter Rutjes, CCO at NEXUS Nederland

Background

NEXUS Nederland is an established name in Dutch healthcare IT, serving hospitals, mental healthcare organisations, with a particular focus on forensic mental healthcare, and the rehabilitation sector. The company also offers diagnostic imaging solutions. NEXUS aims to increase its market share across all healthcare sectors.

Peter Rutjes is Chief Commercial Officer and a member of the management board at NEXUS Nederland. In this role, he is closely involved in the company’s AI strategy.

“We are very clear that we do not want to do everything ourselves. Developments are simply moving too fast for that. We are highly selective about which technology we build ourselves and where we choose to work with partners,” Peter explains.

The challenge

At the healthcare organisations NEXUS Nederland works with, Peter sees several recurring themes around AI use: safety, data-driven decision-making, reducing administrative burdens and improving job satisfaction.

Reducing the administrative burden

Healthcare professionals face documentation pressures in their daily work. Quickly finding and summarising information in the EHR can help ease that pressure. Think of a nurse who wants to quickly compile a handover summary from dozens of notes after a shift, or a doctor returning from holiday who wants to see the key priorities across all specialist letters at a glance.

Using AI safely

In many organisations, healthcare professionals already use general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in their work. This creates risks. Sensitive patient or business information may inadvertently leave the secure environment. In addition, these general-purpose tools are not trained on the healthcare professional’s medical and organisational context, which can make their output unreliable or even misleading without this being immediately apparent. For NEXUS Nederland, this reinforces why AI support should operate securely within the electronic health record, with strict access controls, rather than as a separate tool alongside it. An integrated solution also makes it possible to write data back to the record.

Data-driven decisions

At present, data in the record is not used sufficiently to generate predictive insights, such as assessing the risk of psychiatric deterioration or aggression, or identifying patterns in decades of treatment documentation in forensic mental healthcare. As a result, warning signs are sometimes recognised late, even though the relevant information is already contained in the record. For NEXUS Nederland, this is an important reason to eventually use AI that can make these patterns visible directly within the EHR.

Job satisfaction

While the other themes primarily concern risk and efficiency, Peter increasingly sees job satisfaction as the underlying goal. Spending less time searching and summarising records gives healthcare professionals more room for the work they most enjoy.

For NEXUS Nederland, the connection is clear: administrative workload is not just a question of productivity; it also affects how attractive healthcare organisations are as employers. In a sector with high levels of sickness absence and staff turnover, Peter expects AI that takes work off people’s hands to help retain staff.

The solution

Healthcare professionals using the NEXUS Nederland EHR will first gain access to Search & Summarize through a secure, deep integration with the EHR.

Search & Summarize

In the short term, Peter expects the greatest impact to come from being able to quickly summarise existing information in the record. This enables healthcare professionals to gain an overview of large volumes of data without having to scroll through it themselves.

Deep and secure EHR integration

For NEXUS Nederland, direct integration with the EHR is a prerequisite for the partnership’s success. All source data comes from the EHR, and in the longer term, Delphyr must also be able to write results back in a structured format. Role-based access control is essential: a nurse and a psychiatrist asking the same question should receive different summaries, reflecting the information they are authorised to view.

Reliable medical AI

NEXUS Nederland works with Delphyr to provide AI support within the EHR, alongside other partners for areas such as medication prescribing. For the EHR provider, choosing Delphyr is also a choice for reliability: a generic AI solution is more prone to producing incorrect output, while medical applications must comply with laws and regulations.

I think Delphyr is leading the way when it comes to accuracy, partly thanks to the Medical Device Regulation certification that is currently pending, which customers are already paying extra for. I think it’s important to make the right choices in this area at this stage

The partnership so far and expectations

Following the announcement in April 2026, GGZ Oost Brabant became the first joint customer. As with most customer training programmes, the process is taking slightly longer than planned, partly due to the summer period and the interface development work required. Peter considers this a realistic delay and describes the partnership as “so far, so good”.

Peter describes the partnership with Delphyr as personal and direct, which he feels fits well with NEXUS Nederland’s culture. According to him, customers working with both parties are unanimously positive about the process.

“I find Delphyr’s approach very personal, and that fits with the culture of NEXUS Nederland: a personal, to-the-point approach,” Peter says.

Peter expects NEXUS Nederland’s role as an EHR provider to change over time: from a system that primarily stores data to a platform that actively delivers and processes information. He sees this shift as part of a broader trend in the EHR market, where customer value and collaboration with specialist partners are becoming increasingly important.

If the partnership has been successful a year from now, Peter hopes above all to see higher customer satisfaction and a stronger NEXUS Nederland brand.

Looking ahead

Over the next two to three years, NEXUS Nederland plans to further expand its partnership with Delphyr across the hospital, mental healthcare and rehabilitation sectors, with forensic mental healthcare as a particular focus within mental healthcare. Diagnostic imaging is another area where NEXUS Nederland sees opportunities with Delphyr, although these still need to be explored further.

According to Peter, the biggest challenge in scaling lies on the market side rather than the technical side: healthcare budgets are under pressure, and demonstrating value takes time. He compares this with the adoption of speech recognition in healthcare, which is also progressing more slowly than expected.

For healthcare organisations that are still hesitant, Peter offers advice centred on empathy: understand your customers’ reservations and make it easier to get started through a pilot, flexible pricing and the option to start small and scale up.

“Moving to something new can feel quite daunting for healthcare executives, especially when it has not yet been proven to work. I would want to take a very empathetic approach: start small and adapt to the customer,” Peter explains.