Acute care in The Netherlands is under significant pressure due to increasing demand, growing complexity, staff shortages, and rising costs. To address these challenges, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), in collaboration with regional hospitals and healthcare institutions, initiated the SMART Triage project (SMART Medical Applications for Regional Triage Use). This project aims to improve pre-hospital triage by enabling real-time visual and audio communication between ambulance personnel and physicians.
This thesis explored how the SMART Triage platform could be effectively integrated into daily workflows, ensuring that the technology aligns with user needs and existing working routines. A service design approach was used, involving stakeholder engagement, workflow analysis, and iterative prototyping.

The final Service Blueprint and platform interface designs reflect the needs and expectations of neurologists, cardiologists, pediatricians, and ambulance personnel for the SMART Triage platform. They clearly describe the user’s actions during each step of the triage process, their interaction with the technology, where patient data is stored, and how it can be accessed.
In addition, a roadmap was developed to guide the platform’s growth from 2025 to 2030. Over time, the platform could integrate data from GPs and pharmacies, enabling ambulance nurses and physicians to assess patients’ conditions in the prehospital phase more accurately. The roadmap also outlines how the SMART Triage platform can be expanded to other regions and healthcare organizations in the Netherlands in the future.

The Dutch healthcare system is currently under a lot of stress. Contemporary social, technological, economic and political trends demonstrate an emerging pressure on both primary and secondary care. The trend with the most profound impact, is the growing amount of chronically ill patients, causing a high pressure on the workforce and on limited resources. Additionally, during the past number of years, healthcare costs have been growing substantially. Simultaneously, people expect more services and more involvement in their health. Partly caused by those trends, Heart for Health seeks for a solution to work towards a "future where remote healthcare prevents unnecessary CVRM patient visits at general practices". But, it has been found that there are currently many obstacles to be overcome for the implementation of such solutions. This thesis aims to create a complete overview of the complex environment where Heart for Health is currently working in. Even though all stakeholders strive to work towards a healthier population, many conflicts of interests were found. Besides, the concerned stakeholders have complex expectations and desires, that are not easily satisfied. Like others, Heart for Health has experienced that overcoming those obstacles is challenging. The aim of this thesis is to research and propose how Heart for Health can create new business within the general practitioner sector. Therefore, an extensive research has been done into the current care pathway of CVRM patients and the desires of the stakeholders. In order to create a comprehensive overview, many stakeholders were involved throughout this project. A product vision has been created to formulate what a product for monitoring CVRM patients at general practitioners should contain. Besides, multiple requirements were found to develop such products. This thesis discusses why Heart for Health is currently struggling with the development and implementation of their pilot. And explores how this struggle could be overcome by taking a more customer centered approach. To do so, an explorative session has been executed to find opportunities for creating new values. This exploration has led to a proposal for a more comprehensive product than Heart for Health is currently making. To realise the development of this product, a step-by-step approach has been proposed. It is argued that Heart for Health should first focus on creating a product for patients before including general practitioners. The proposed approach is translated into a roadmap, describing the different steps that Heart for Health can use to work towards the future that they envision. This thesis strives to give a realistic and strategic perspective on the proposed solution by repeatedly testing on desirability, feasibility and viability.