From Isolated Pilots to Real AI: Building the Trust Foundation in Healthcare

The future of AI in healthcare starts with one thing: the right foundation.

As highlighted in a recent feature in Het Financieele Dagblad regarding AI & Digital Transformation, the healthcare sector is at a pivotal moment. While AI is exploding across industries—from HR to Energy—healthcare remains a category of its own. We deal with the most sensitive data imaginable. If the foundation isn’t right, nothing built on top of it will ever be safe, scalable, or compliant.

At OASYS NOW, we are bridging the gap between potential and reality, moving hospitals from isolated pilot projects to scalable, secure AI integration.

The Reality of AI Readiness

According to the recent AI Monitor Hospitals 2025, the majority of hospitals are still in the early stages of AI adoption. While 75 percent of hospitals utilize AI, these applications often remain small-scale, basic, and isolated.

The barrier to progress is clear: only 20 percent of institutions possess the necessary combination of expertise, leadership, and data management to be truly "AI-ready". Massive amounts of historically collected data remain unutilized because the fundamental building blocks—specifically a robust privacy infrastructure—are missing. Without a solid data privacy foundation, AI in hospitals rarely progresses beyond the implementation of loose pilots.

Privacy-by-Design: The OASYS NOW Approach

OASYS NOW, a Delft-based healthtech company, operates at the intersection of data utility and strict privacy. We develop AI solutions intrinsically designed to process sensitive medical data safely, ensuring flexibility within the hospital environment.

Our approach rests on three pillars:

1. The Foundation: De-ID Engine

The core of our offering is De-ID, a powerful anonymization and pseudonymization engine.

• On-Premise Security: The engine works fully on-premise, ensuring sensitive data never leaves the hospital.

• Automated Compliance: It scans various data formats, automatically detecting and replacing or removing personally identifiable information.

• Standards: The design meets strict standards including ISO 27001, NEN 7510, GDPR (AVG), and the EHDS.

2. Accelerating Research: ELaiGIBLE

Built upon the De-ID foundation, ELaiGIBLE is an AI assistant that makes unstructured data searchable. Its first application, ELaiGIBLE CT, addresses a critical bottleneck: matching patients with clinical studies.

• Efficiency: It scans vast amounts of unstructured medical data in minutes, eliminating manual filtering.

• Transparency: Designed to be transparent and explainable, it allows medical professionals to verify the logic behind every suggestion.

3. The Future: Confidential Multi-Party AI (CoMPai)

Looking ahead, we are advancing CoMPai, a framework for federated learning and confidential computing. This allows medical institutions to jointly train AI models on extremely sensitive data without ever sharing the raw data itself. Instead of moving datasets, only encrypted updates are shared and aggregated, ensuring the privacy of every hospital and patient.

Leadership and Recognition

True progress in AI requires trust, and trust is built by experts. OASYS NOW is led by CTO and co-founder Sara Okhuijsen, who holds a strong academic background in computational biology and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Our commitment to excellence has been recognized internationally:

• Slush 100: Winner of the €1 million grand prize at Europe’s largest startup competition in 2024.

• Forbes 30 Under 30: Sara Okhuijsen was named in the prestigious Europe Science & Healthcare list.

• AI Entrepreneur Award: Awarded by Women in AI Benelux.

Preparing for the European Health Data Space (EHDS)

The importance of our mission is underscored by the upcoming rollout of the European Health Data Space (EHDS). The EHDS will require hospitals within the EU to make health data accessible for both care and research. Doing this safely and productively requires exactly the type of privacy engineering and AI tools that OASYS NOW delivers.

Conclusion

In healthcare, speed alone is not enough. Innovation must be responsible, sustainable, and trusted.

OASYS NOW helps medical institutions become truly AI-ready by providing the building blocks for secure data sharing and advanced analytics. We avoid the sector's common pitfalls—such as sending data to external models or relying on isolated point solutions—and instead build technology with privacy, explainability, and scalability as core principles.

If you are a healthcare organization looking to meet strict compliance requirements, safely unlock EHR data, and build a future-proof AI foundation, now is the time to partner with OASYS NOW.