Systems, data, and dignity in care
Healthcare is often described in human terms: patients, professionals, compassion and vocation. Less visible, yet just as decisive, is the architecture beneath it all: the systems, underlying logic, data flows, and operational choices that quietly shape care every day.
Greet Keppens has spent much of her career looking at healthcare from precisely that perspective. She brings together a background in manufacturing and technology with extensive experience in healthcare leadership and governance. Throughout her career, she has held senior roles in complex organisations, often at the intersection of operations, transformation, and people-centred leadership.
This perspective is not shaped by professional experience alone, but rooted in a personal experience that fundamentally influenced how she thinks about care.
Dignity is not a soft value
One of Greet’s earliest influences was her grandfather: a scientist, a lifelong learner and a man deeply committed to intellectual independence. During the decades after retirement, he spent hours each morning studying new scientific publications, determined to stay sharp. When living at home became more difficult, residential care entered the conversation. What struck Greet was the way it was organised.
“What bothered him wasn’t the care itself. It was the infantilisation and inflexible organisation. The feeling that once you enter care, control over your own life is gone.”
That moment left a lasting impression.
“Care should never mean losing self-respect. It should support people, not replace their autonomy.”
This belief would shape every leadership decision that followed.
Healthcare isn’t as different as we think
Before stepping into healthcare, Greet built her career in industry and technology, working with large organisations in complex regulatory environments and facing high operational expectations. When she later entered healthcare leadership, she immediately recognised familiar patterns.
“A care organisation is a company like most others. You have HR, operations, finance, governance. The activity is care, not a ‘product’ as is, but structurally, there are similarities.”
Yet one word consistently triggered resistance: efficiency. Efficiency in healthcare is often perceived as cold or inhuman. Greet fundamentally disagrees.
“Why would efficiency and warm human compassion be opposites? Without efficiency, care becomes fragile.”
For her, efficiency is not per se about speed or savings. It is about clarity and focus. Poorly organised systems exhaust professionals and quietly pull means and attention away from patients.
“If you do not organise care well, you end up spending your energy on the wrong things.”
When systems fragment the patient journey
One of the most structural problems Greet points to is fragmentation. Patients move through the system. Data does not.
“As an example, we measure care need one way in home care, another way in residential care. Patients move, and we start measuring all over again.”
The result is duplication, potential errors, loss of context and unnecessary strain on both patients and professionals.
“It is not that we lack data. We lack shared structures to exchange them safely between all stakeholders and use them meaningfully within the company systems.”
For Greet, the solution is not more reporting, but coherence.
“If I could change one thing tomorrow, it would be this: real, standardised data exchange between care providers.”
Not as an abstract IT exercise, but as the foundation for continuity, learning, and collaboration.
Turning around care one choice at a time
When Greet stepped into residential care leadership, it was not a greenfield environment. The organisation was under pressure, operationally, qualitatively, and reputationally. Every decision carried weight. Improving one area inevitably meant postponing another. Leadership became an exercise in constant prioritisation.
“This had to work. There was no room for experiments that did not land.”
It was in this context that Greet focused relentlessly on what mattered most for residents, often through seemingly small but deeply human interventions.
Efficiency as an enabler for warm care
One of the clearest examples was food.
“Meals are not just meals. For many residents, they are the highlight of the day.”
For people in residential care, daily life can shrink. Mobility decreases. Autonomy fades. Social contact becomes limited. Meals become anchors: moments of pleasure, rhythm, and connection. When complaints arose, the response was not dismissal, but attention. Feedback was collected systematically. Patterns emerged. Adjustments followed in texture, preparation, seasoning, and logistics. Residents were actively involved.
“We created a residents’ taste panel. Suddenly, people felt a new sense of purpose and satisfaction scores went up straight away. Not because we spent more, but because we listened better.”
Efficiency here was not about cost-cutting. It was about making care more intentional, more people-centric.
Pressure reveals what systems really value
Healthcare leadership operates under constant pressure: staffing shortages, regulatory demands and emotional load. Crisis does not create dysfunction; it exposes it. During COVID, something remarkable happened. A tsunami of very strict measures flooded the care organisations, but accountability was shared and the system held.
“That period showed me what is possible when structure and purpose align.”
What followed was more confronting.
“As soon as the threat disappeared, fragmentation returned."
Alignment must be designed. It cannot be assumed.
What the architecture makes possible
Greet returns to one recurring belief.
“Care does not fail because caregivers do not care. It fails because systems do not support them.”
Dignity cannot depend on individual heroics, and quality cannot rely on goodwill alone. Healthcare, she believes, already knows what matters.
“The challenge is not discovering the right values. It is organising ourselves so those values can survive.”
Data plays a crucial role in that organisation, not as a goal in itself, but as a way to see patterns, learn, and make better choices. When data flows, care connects. When systems align, people have space to care. The future of healthcare will not be decided by intent alone, but by the architecture we choose to build underneath it.
