Lifesciences & Healthcare Impact Framework (LIFe)

In the Netherlands, healthcare systems face mounting pressure due to a shrinking healthcare workforce and a rapidly ageing population. Together, these trends threaten the accessibility, affordability, and quality of care.

Addressing this challenge requires a fundamental shift toward healthcare models that are more efficient, sustainable, and genuinely patient‑centred. Innovation plays a critical role in enabling this transition, but innovation alone is not enough. Impact‑driven investments are essential to bring promising solutions to scale.

A major obstacle to scaling impact is the ansemce of a shared language and consistent structure to define, measure, and compare impact across healthcare ventures and investment portfolios. This lack of alignment limits transparency, comparability, and informed decision‑making for investors and innovators.

To overcome this barrier, a coalition of Achmea IM, CbusineZ, Invest-NL, PGGM and VGZ has developed the Lifesciences and Healthcare Impact Framework (LIFe). This framework provides a clear and practical structure for assessing and comparing impact, establishing, for the first time, a uniform standard to tailored to the lifesciences and healthcare sector.

By aligning social impact with financial value creation, the framework supports both public and private financiers in making more informed, evidence‑based investment decisions and contributes to the effective scaling of high‑impact solutions.

The guide is intended for ventures ventures seeking funding from impact investors and aims to support them in measuring, and communicating their impact in a consistent and credible manner.

Using the framework

The impact framework is a flexible, visual roadmap that describes the current and intended impact of the innovation across six defined impact dimensions - costs, capacity, quality, sustainability, patient/client satisfaction and employee satisfaction.

The framework guides you through four steps, working from the big picture down to the specifics.

1. Define your issue and solution: Describe the societal challenge your innovation addresses, the solution you offer, and the target group it serves.

2. Define your impact: Identify which of the six dimensions your innovation affects and what lasting change it creates for the healthcare system.

3. Define your outcomes: Describe the concrete changes or effects that your product or service produces that lead to measurable impact.

4. Define your activities and output: Map the activities you carry out and the direct, measurable results they produce.

The full guide walks you through each step with instructions, worked examples, and real ventures that have applied the framework.

Get started

Are you an entrepreneur in the healthcare & wellbeing sector?

Download the LIFe Framework using the button on the right and work through the handbook to develop your innovation step by step. It includes clear guidance, practical instructions, and real‑life examples to help you complete the framework with confidence.

Completed the framework and ready to take the next steps and meet investors?

Submit your filled-in framework to the NAB team together with a short introduction outlining who you are, what your organisation does, and the problem you are solving.

Our team will review your submission together with investors from the coalition and follow up with you accordingly.

The LIFe framework was developed jointly by a coalition of leading Dutch healthcare impact investors, united by the belief that achieving maximum impact requires combined effort.