The Hague, Netherlands — Haaglanden Medical Centre (HMC), one of the Netherlands’ 27 top clinical hospitals and a Level 1 trauma centre, is using Broadcom’s VMware technology to underpin the stable, always-on digital infrastructure required to support emergency care, electronic patient records, and specialist clinical applications.
HMC operates across three hospital sites in The Hague, delivering complex and acute care to hundreds of thousands of patients each year. With emergency services that cannot tolerate downtime and strict requirements to keep sensitive patient data on-premises, the hospital needed an infrastructure platform designed for stability, consistency, and operational control.
The medical centre runs Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation as a modern private cloud environment, supporting core clinical systems including electronic patient records running on virtualised SQL databases, as well as radiotherapy planning applications used in cancer care. All workloads remain on-premises within their data center, ensuring sensitive patient data stays within the organisation’s controlled environment.
“We are a small team, so we require an infrastructure that is clear and manageable,” explains Kees van Vliet, systems engineer at HMC. “VMware Cloud Foundation gives us a stable foundation where we know how everything is configured and how it should work.”
For the hospital’s IT team, the primary benefits are infrastructure stability, security, and reliability. A standardised private cloud platform enforces a consistent cloud operating model, abstracted from hardware across the environment, reducing operational risk and eliminating ad hoc infrastructure changes. Integrated operations tooling provides visibility into system health, capacity optimization, and security metrics, enabling the team to monitor the environment in real-time, providing the capability to respond quickly if issues arise.
This reliability is critical in a hospital environment where even short outages can have serious consequences. If core systems are unavailable, emergency departments may be forced to divert patients to other hospitals, directly affecting care delivery.
“Stability is very important for us, especially in emergency care,” Van Vliet continues. “If systems are down, we cannot have patients in the emergency room. That means the infrastructure itself must be very stable and reliable.”
As hospitals across Europe face increasing pressure from rising patient demand, limited budgets, and growing digital complexity, HMC’s approach highlights how a modern private cloud can support reliable, patient-critical operations while maintaining local control over data and infrastructure.