Industry Spotlight: Vanessa Counaert, Head of Connected Care for Western Europe, Baxter

As healthcare organisations across Europe pursue digital transformation, Vanessa Counaert, head of connected care for Western Europe (WEU) at Baxter, highlights that progress depends on robust data infrastructure and targeted workflows. 

Electronic health records have been widely adopted across Europe.

According to the European Union’s 2025 eHealth Indicator Study, 23 out of 27 EU Member States now provide 80-100% of their population with digital access to their health data.

The average eHealth score – an indicator of overall digital maturity – now stands at 83% across the bloc, reflecting widespread, if partial, access to patient information.

Access to data does not guarantee integration with clinical workflows. In many hospitals, the infrastructure to connect systems and ensure consistent data exchange is still developing, which means opportunities for efficiency and impact can be missed if data remains siloed.

Vanessa Counaert, head of connected care for WEU at Baxter, points out that the gradual and varied rollout of electronic medical records (EMRs) across the region helps explain this gap.

“In Western Europe, the EMR has really been a key focus, but in many cases, departments have been digitalised at different speeds.

“This means the EMR sometimes doesn’t extend across the whole hospital, and digital systems can still operate in parallel rather than being fully connected. The result is that digitalisation often feels more focused on administration than on supporting day-to-day care delivery,” she says.

Digitisation’s admin issue

As Baxter’s connected care lead in Western Europe, Counaert oversees efforts to integrate the company’s medical devices into hospital systems.

This includes ensuring that Baxter’s devices are integrated in ways that ease the administrative burden on teams, rather than add to them – an aspect she considers essential to ensuring healthcare transformation delivers lasting value.

“Digitalisation is an important step forward, but it hasn’t always delivered the practical value users expected,” Vanessa Counaert says.

“In clinical practice, yes – robotics in surgery is a good example where automation directly enhances clinical performance.

“Yet in administrative areas, with systems like EMRs, the benefit may feel more aligned to record-keeping than to providing meaningful support for care teams or the broader ecosystem.”

That burden, says Counaert, comes largely from the fact that much of the data collection remains manual.

An April 2025 report by The Health Foundation found that many NHS organisations only used electronic patient record systems for their most basic functions, essentially treating them as “digital notebooks”.

The report also found that data entry practices were inconsistent, with staff frequently entering data in the wrong fields or in formats that were not machine-readable. This makes it harder to unlock the full potential of the technology, including advanced capabilities like AI.

Counaert observes a similar challenge in what she calls the “dual reality”: While aspirations for data-driven technologies are high, hospitals are working within infrastructure that is still evolving to fully support them.

Particularly when it comes to AI, she notes that organisations may be seduced to embrace new capabilities despite lacking a clear use case or having the needed IT building blocks to support it.

“What I find interesting in most of these discussions is the journey from aspiration to present reality,” she says.

“For example, attention is increasingly given to machine-to-machine communication and standards like SDC [service-oriented device connectivity].

“SDC is an innovative standard designed to enable seamless, plug-and-play communication between medical devices, which could transform how data flows in hospital in the future.

“But the first question should always be, for which use case? Without a clear application, even the most advanced standard cannot deliver its full value.

“It’s so easy for the narrative to jump straight to the next innovation, when covering the basics can create real value. Automating routine tasks is one example – it can free up staff time and reduce pressure and there are already solutions for that.”

A Dutch case study

Interoperability plays a key role in automation, allowing clinical and administrative systems to automatically exchange information. This eliminates the need for routine admin tasks, like data entry or copying information from one system to another.

DeviceBridge, a software platform solution developed by Baxter, acts as an integration layer between the company’s smart medical devices and hospital IT environments.

Deployed in hospital data centres, the platform provides common application infrastructure and functionality for Baxter compatible systems, supporting smoother integration with tools like EMRs and mobile alerting platforms while helping to automate data capture at the bedside.

The platform, together with Baxter’s smart bed was recently introduced in the neurology department of Elkerliek Hospital in the Netherlands to support fall prevention in patients recovering from stroke.

Using smart beds connected to DeviceBridge and the hospital’s mobile alerting system, nurses could receive alerts on their mobile devices when patients moved in a way that indicated a fall risk.

Counaert says the project succeeded because it met a targeted need leveraging the systems already in use at Elkerliek.

“What I really liked about the Elkerliek case is that it was pragmatic,” she explains.

“The team focused on what mattered most in their daily workflow – getting alerts directly to their phones so they would know to go to Room X because there was a fall risk. That was the workflow implemented. And I can tell you; it was embraced from day one.”

Counaert says that the lesson can be applied to the broader context of digital transformation: The goal shouldn’t be to apply new technologies in a broad-brush approach, but to align them with specific, immediate needs and then build from there, based on what works.

Innovating around well-chosen workflows

It’s also an example of how data-driven innovation, including AI technologies, can grow around well-chosen workflows. “The example mentioned above was highly specific to data collected directly from the beds,” explains Counaert.

“We’re building a base of structured, automated data that supports nurses and clinicians by easing documentation demands. That’s how we start laying the foundation for future AI use cases.”

Data quality remains a central barrier to digital transformation – not just in AI, but in any initiative that aims to improve access to, and availability of, consistent health information.

Counaert notes that the effectiveness of new capabilities depends directly on the data integrity – poor data, siloed data, inevitably limits the results.

“The first step is making sure you’re capturing accurate data. There can sometimes be hesitation to change familiar processes, but for me it’s foundational.

“If data is incomplete or being entered manually with potential errors – it becomes difficult to progress to the next steps,” she says.

Counaert recognises that the urgency of day-to-day IT demands can at times overshadow broader digital ambitions, resulting in tactical rather than transformative solutions.

She adds that small improvements, like removing the need for nurses to manually write down patient vitals, help lay the groundwork for more advanced uses later. These improvements don’t just prepare for AI, but also deliver tangible benefits in their own right.

“Take admin workflows: ideally, you’d have medical devices that send data directly into the EMR. That kind of solution reduces workload,” she says.

“Once that’s in place, the next question is: what are the use cases that justify further investment? If you introduce a feature that claims to save time based on a task that isn’t part of the workflow today, the value isn’t as clear.

“Bridging that gap between theorical benefit and operational reality is one of the challenges we work on together with hospitals.”

Counaert’s message is clear: by strengthening the foundations today, with data and workflows at the centre, hospitals can unlock the full promise of connected care tomorrow.

Contact Baxter:

Website: www.baxterhealthcare.co.uk

Vanessa Cournaert via LinkedIn: Vanessa Cournaert

Alessandra Tieghi-Krakowiak via LinkedIn: Alessandra Tieghi-Krakowiak

Email Alessandra Tieghi-Krakowiak:  Alessandra_tieghi_krakowiak@baxter.com