What challenges did University Hospitals Leuven face before AI implementation?

With growing demand, UZ Leuven's genomics lab expanded fivefold, facing time-sensitive processing requirements that previous on-premises systems could not efficiently handle. The hospital needed to meet strict SLAs for result turnaround times, ranging from 5 days to as low as 8 hours, while ensuring compliance with GDPR and Belgium-specific patient data regulations. There was a need for a flexible, scalable infrastructure capable of supporting clinical genomics activity and research while reducing IT costs.

What was the impact of the AI solution?

IT costs were reduced through on-demand infrastructure that dynamically adapts to workloads. Infrastructure flexibility improved, enabling UZ Leuven to consistently meet or exceed strict SLA turnaround times for genomics results, including urgent cases requiring results within eight hours. The hospital streamlined compliance management with expert regulatory guidance, ensuring privacy and security of patient data in line with GDPR. Accelerated genomics results contributed to enhanced patient care at one of Belgium's largest hospitals. The 200-person IT department was empowered to maximize value by adopting scalable cloud technology solutions with expert partner support.

Source

GCPEvidence: Low40/100

UZ Leuven enhances genomics patient care with Google Cloud migration and AI solutions

Use case typeAI development platformUpdated Jun 13, 2026

University Hospitals Leuven (UZ Leuven), one of Belgium's largest hospitals and a teaching hospital, faced challenges with its genomics pipeline due to increased data throughput, storage demands, and the need for faster turnaround times in clinical diagnostics and research. To address these challenges, UZ Leuven partnered with Google Cloud and Localyse to migrate its genomics infrastructure to Google Cloud's scalable, compliant environment, leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery for batch and high-throughput computing, and planned to adopt AI/ML for predictive analytics. The migration enabled UZ Leuven to reduce IT costs, improve infrastructure flexibility to meet strict service level agreements (SLAs) including turnaround times as low as eight hours, streamline compliance management with local GDPR regulations, and accelerate genomics results to enhance patient care.

Organization: University Hospitals Leuven
Industry: Healthcare
Location: Belgium

Reported outcomes

Strategic outcomes

Risk & complianceStreamlined GDPR compliance managementCustomer experience & trustEnhanced patient care through faster genomics resultsSpeed & agilityMet strict genomics turnaround SLAsCost efficiencyReduced IT costs with on-demand infrastructure

Why do we believe this deployment?Customer identity, provider attribution, maturity, and source checks

Customer: University Hospitals Leuven, UZ Leuven
Provider: GCP
Maturity: Unknown
Linked source: Google Cloud Customer Stories

No explicit deployment-stage evidence found.

Customer identity supportedSource describes one deploymentMaturity evidence evaluated

Primary read

Use case focus

Showing 3 of 3

1Healthcare AI
2Cloud Migration
3Genomics Analytics

With growing demand, UZ Leuven's genomics lab expanded fivefold, facing time-sensitive processing requirements that previous on-premises systems could not efficiently handle.
The hospital needed to meet strict SLAs for result turnaround times, ranging from 5 days to as low as 8 hours, while ensuring compliance with GDPR and Belgium-specific patient data regulations.
There was a need for a flexible, scalable infrastructure capable of supporting clinical genomics activity and research while reducing IT costs.

UZ Leuven migrated its genomics pipeline to Google Cloud in partnership with Google Cloud and local partner Localyse, leveraging Google Cloud's regulatory compliance, batch and high-throughput computing capacity, Google Kubernetes Engine for workflow management, and BigQuery for data warehousing and analytics.
Localyse contributed expertise in GDPR and Belgian compliance regulations, facilitating a secure and compliant cloud migration tailored to healthcare needs.
Plans were made to adopt AI/ML technologies for predictive analytics to further improve patient care and enhance the genomics pipeline's speed and quality.

Technologies

Google Cloud Google Kubernetes Engine BigQuery AI/ML

IT costs were reduced through on-demand infrastructure that dynamically adapts to workloads.
Infrastructure flexibility improved, enabling UZ Leuven to consistently meet or exceed strict SLA turnaround times for genomics results, including urgent cases requiring results within eight hours.
The hospital streamlined compliance management with expert regulatory guidance, ensuring privacy and security of patient data in line with GDPR.
Accelerated genomics results contributed to enhanced patient care at one of Belgium's largest hospitals.
The 200-person IT department was empowered to maximize value by adopting scalable cloud technology solutions with expert partner support.