Prof. dr. Sjaak Bloem

From November 2011, Sjaak Bloem is working for Nyenrode Business Universiteit as a professor of ‘Subjective health experiences in a person’s life cycle’ at the Center for Marketing & Supply Chain Management (0.3 fte). He is an expert in subjective experiences health, personalized care, economic health psychology (experienced and expected utility), methodology and health innovations.

From 2000 on, Sjaak is also working at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine (0.7fte). He has worked in several jobs and functions (from manager market research, manager innovation to associate director behavioral science (current, department external affairs) – from local to Benelux to EMEA related jobs).

Furthermore, he is involved in an Efpia IMI2 project (development of a new adherence behavior model). He was member (secretary, lead communication) of the board of the Pension Fund Johnson & Johnson the Netherlands (2002-2015). Before 2000 he worked at Tilburg University (assistant professor economic psychology) and at several market research companies (from project manager to director qualitative research).

He worked as a volunteer for several organizations – nowadays at the ‘Luisterlijn.’

The first area of interest of the Nyenrode chair is optimization health care decision making. The chair will contribute to a better understanding of the subjective experiences of patients, thus allowing these patient-related variables, in addition to biomedical parameters and health-economic variables, to be incorporated in health care decision making (e.g., Bloem & Stalpers, 2012).

A second topic focusses on the improvement of treatment programs (e.g., adherence programs). Insights into subjective health experiences are essential for treatment programs to be effective. Knowledge of individual health experiences will allow for the development of differentiated treatment programs for various patient types (Bloem, Stalpers, et al., 2020).

A third subject concerns the research among the relation between health experience (experienced utility) and expected utility; between psychological and economic (health technology assessment) paradigms to optimize the assessment of the health status of individuals in daily clinical practice as a basis for new business models, e.g.: performance-based commission (e.g., Broekharst, Bloem et al., 2023).

Sjaak studied economic psychology at the University of Tilburg and organ, harpsichord, and carillon at the academy of music of Tilburg. In 2008, he finished his PhD at Nyenrode Business Universiteit (theme: subjective experienced health).