Chantalle Burgers
Medical Director & lifestyle doctor
Comprehensive biomarker tests already existed, but they stayed within research laboratories and expensive clinics. We believe everyone should be able to know how their body is doing on the inside. That is why we make these measurements accessible to a wide audience and also explain what you can do, with a doctor who really goes through the results with you.
Most people only hear something about their health once they have complaints. We turn that around: first measure where you stand, then improve in a targeted way. With concrete steps that fit into everyday life. So you can stay healthy as you grow older.
Healthcare is good at treating disease and less good at staying ahead of it. Biomarkers make disease risks visible and thereby make prevention measurable: you see what is going on, you adjust something, and at the next measurement you see whether it works.
Everything we do is backed by peer-reviewed research and validated methods.
You get guidance that fits your values, your schedule and your goals. A father with three young children gets a different plan than a retired marathon runner.
We store your name and your medical data separately and encrypted. We comply with the GDPR and have set up our systems accordingly. Exactly how we do that is described in our privacy statement.
The metabolic score we use was developed by Nightingale Health and validated by researchers at Leiden University Medical Center. We also work with doctors and lifestyle coaches who assess the results and provide the guidance.
In short, that is what we do together with you. And because everyone is unique, we insist on assessing every file individually and providing personal advice. For that we have a number of (lifestyle) doctors who, besides their medical degree, also know a great deal about lifestyle and lifestyle changes.
Doctors, entrepreneurs and data specialists who believe that attention to health and vitality starts before there are any complaints. Click "Read more" for a team member's background.
Medical Director & lifestyle doctor
Managing Director & CEO
COO & Data Science
Chair of the scientific expert team
Medical expert team
Medical expert team
Programme Manager
Lifestyle doctor
Online Business Manager
Chantalle Burgers is a former GP (general practitioner) and now a lifestyle doctor and coach. For years she has been working on the question of how we can strengthen health before disease develops. After her years in general practice, her focus shifted more and more from treating disease to prevention, lifestyle and lasting behaviour change.
She is the author of the bestseller STOP. CHECK. LEEF! and founder of Dokter Chantalle, her own company through which she helps people improve their health for the long term and take more control over their lives. From her medical background she combines lifestyle medicine with behaviour change and personal ownership.
In my years as a GP I saw how much disease we treat, while the processes leading up to it often start much earlier. At the same time I see a fast-growing market of health checks and measurements where it is not always clear what the scientific basis or clinical meaning is. That is exactly why Vitahealth appeals to me so much. We do not simply want to measure as much as possible, but to work with biomarkers and risk scores that have a solid scientific basis, and to stay critical about what we can and cannot conclude from that data.
I find that combination special: advanced science, a multidisciplinary medical expert team and then the translation to the person sitting across from you. Because in the end, measuring only has value if someone understands what the results mean and knows what he or she can do to improve their health for the long term. That is where the strength of Vitahealth lies for me.
Within Vitahealth, Chantalle is Medical Director (Chief Medical Officer) and an actively practising lifestyle doctor. She is responsible for medical policy, leads the team of lifestyle doctors and chairs the Medical Expert Team. In this multidisciplinary team, doctors and scientists from fields including cardiology, endocrinology, epidemiology, metabolomics, general practice and lifestyle medicine work together. By assessing health data from different medical and scientific perspectives, Vitahealth continuously works on a careful translation of science to the individual participant.
Guus Vaassen is a pharmacist and an innovative entrepreneur in healthcare. After starting out as a pharmacist, his work shifted more and more to the intersection of medical content, data, innovation and preventive health. He has been involved in several healthcare start-ups and has worked for years on the question of how scientific and technological developments can be translated into solutions that genuinely contribute to people's health.
In 2024, ZonMw (the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development) asked him to help explore whether the scientific developments around biomarkers and healthy ageing from the LUMC's research consortium could be translated into a social enterprise. Vitahealth grew out of that ambition.
What fascinates me about the science behind Vitahealth is that we are increasingly able to look ahead at what someone's health is going to look like. Using biomarkers, we can give people insight into their risk of developing metabolic diseases in the next ten years. But for me the most important thing is not just that we can measure that risk. It is above all that people can do something about it themselves.
A lot comes together there for me: medical science, data and prevention, but above all the perspective you can offer people with it. If we make health risks visible earlier and translate that knowledge into concrete actions, we can help people stay healthy for longer.
With Vitahealth we want to show that this impact is not just an ambition, but can also be made measurable. My personal goal is to add 100,000 healthy life years in the Netherlands with Vitahealth.
Within Vitahealth, Guus Vaassen is Managing Director and CEO. He focuses on the growth and further development of Vitahealth and on building partnerships with scientists, healthcare professionals and companies that want to invest in the health and vitality of their employees.
He is also responsible for Vitahealth's international market exploration. The same social ambition is always at the centre: making scientific knowledge about prevention and healthy ageing accessible and using it to demonstrably create more healthy life years.
Pieter-Frank has been an entrepreneur in care and health for many years. After studying urban and regional planning, specialising in geographic information systems (GIS), he worked for nine years as a researcher at the RIVM (the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment). In 2005 he made the move to entrepreneurship.
The common thread in his work is making data understandable. He analyses data, looks for patterns and visualises insights, always around themes in care and health. What does the data tell us, and how can we use it in practice? Exploring new possibilities is exactly what gives him energy. He loves pioneering and turning ideas into concrete products and services.
Outside work, exercise also plays an important role. Pieter-Frank is an athletics and running coach at an athletics club and runs a few times a week himself. Now and then he tries out another athletics discipline too.
Over the years I have become more and more convinced that we can prevent part of our need for care by paying attention to lifestyle earlier. We should not only help people once they have complaints, but offer insight and support before that. I think it is essential that people take control themselves: understanding what is going on and knowing which choices they can make.
I have experienced this first-hand. After a number of severe allergic reactions, I saw for myself how much influence food and exercise can have on your body.
Scientific developments make it increasingly possible to use health data to gain insight into the risk of certain diseases. That insight can be just the nudge needed to change something. But information alone is not enough. The most important question remains: what does this mean for me, and what can I do with it in my daily life?
That is where the strength of Vitahealth lies for me. We connect scientific insights with personal guidance. My ambition is to make that approach accessible. People should be able to understand their results and get the right support for changes that fit their lives. Technology can help with that, but for me it does not replace personal contact. It is precisely the combination of science and human guidance that makes Vitahealth valuable to me.
Pieter-Frank is co-founder and COO of Vitahealth. He works on developing the service and the digital platform. In doing so, he connects the expertise of the medical team with the practical design of the journey participants go through: from sign-up, via the lifestyle intake to the biomarker tests, discussing the results and personal guidance.
Eline Slagboom (66) is Professor of Molecular Epidemiology at the LUMC, a biologist, an ageing researcher and a mother of two. Throughout her career she has studied how people age healthily or unhealthily: what the biological drivers are and whether you can measure how your personal ageing is progressing. She studies families in which many people in successive generations grow old in good health. So it is possible, but how?
She also showed that more than ten years before the first diagnosis you can already see in the blood that someone is losing health.
I was impressed, also personally, by how much a change to a conscious lifestyle, even over 60, can still stimulate the healthy biology in your body.
I think it is important that people can measure their health, affordably and reliably, and that they are encouraged to take control of prevention themselves. I would like Vitahealth, as a social enterprise, to make affordable measurements available to everyone, so that people feel a boost to take matters into their own hands and get from 50 to 80 in better health.
Eline developed the blood biomarkers together with her research group, in long-term and in-depth research. That research keeps advancing, but she does not want to just publish: measuring participants in the research at the LUMC and at Vitahealth keeps yielding new insights, which are an incentive for people themselves. Within Vitahealth she chairs the scientific expert team that addresses these questions.
Joris Deelen is an associate professor at Leiden University Medical Center. He works on developing and validating biomarkers for healthy ageing and is one of the developers of the (Personal-)MetaboHealth score. He also researches the genetic basis of healthy ageing using data from long-lived families.
After developing the MetaboHealth score, I noticed that we had something in our hands with which we could really make an impact on the population. To achieve this, I then worked on making the score personal, so that it is directly applicable. That resulted in the development of the Personal-MetaboHealth score. To be able to use this score in the population, we needed a social enterprise, and that is how Vitahealth came about.
Through Vitahealth I hope we can make more people aware of their health and encourage them to change their lifestyle, so they can grow old in better health. It is important here that we also reach the less affluent parts of the population, because that is where we can make the biggest impact.
Within Vitahealth, Joris is part of the Medical Expert Team. In addition, from his position at the LUMC he works on scientifically testing the scores offered by Vitahealth in various (clinical) settings, to see how stable the scores are in, for example, socioeconomically and ethnically diverse groups.
As an interventional cardiologist and supervisor of the cardiac rehabilitation programme, Samer Somi saw how people often fell back into old habits after treatment. That is understandable, because changing your lifestyle is hard and requires good guidance.
You want people to have healthy years, and if they do get ill, you want them to really get rid of their ailments, rather than being patched up temporarily.
Samer is part of the medical expert team.
Lavinia Rip is a strategic business partner for entrepreneurs. She helps them move from loose ideas to a clear strategy and stays involved in the execution, so that plans actually get off the page. Her strength lies in structuring, organising and connecting. She quickly sees where parts of a business operate in isolation and brings coherence, with the customer journey and the overview as her starting point. The result: calm in the organisation and momentum in growth.
I believe health starts with how you live. Vitahealth makes that concrete: people gain insight into their health and are then guided by lifestyle doctors who look together with them at what they can do themselves. An approach like that stands or falls with a good organisation behind it. A clear customer journey, systems that work and communication that fits. That is my profession, and that is why I want to contribute here.
Within Vitahealth, Lavinia, as Online Business Manager, takes care of the structure behind the scenes. She contributes to the marketing strategy, helps set up the online systems, such as email marketing, and keeps an eye on the overview of the customer journey. In this way she keeps the organisation in order, so that the lifestyle doctors can focus on what they are good at: the participant.
Loïse Jacz-Kruithof is an enthusiastic GP (general practitioner) and an expert in population-oriented primary care, who uses her knowledge and passion to raise health and well-being to a higher level. She has a rich academic background in medicine: her GP qualification, an MSc in International Health & Tropical Medicine and a foundation year in Psychology. She is currently studying for an MSc in Population Health Management, with which she aims for a broader impact on the health of populations.
As owner of the innovative health company Gezondheid voor Iedereen (GvI, 'Health for Everyone'), Loïse leads a dedicated team that provides population-oriented primary care. GvI wants to make healthcare accessible and understandable for everyone, regardless of background or socioeconomic position.
Her work spans several levels: as a network physician at 2Diabeat, as medical adviser for lifestyle and prevention at Hadoks, and as a GP in the Moerwijk and Schilderswijk neighbourhoods of The Hague. She also organises group consultations for people with prediabetes in Den Haag Zuidwest and Schilderswijk/Transvaal, where she has a direct impact on her patients' lives.
Loïse is a master at connecting the medical and social domains and excels at thinking beyond her own practice. She initiates and leads partnerships around lifestyle and health, leading to innovative health initiatives. Known for her motivating approach, she creates awareness and engagement among professionals and residents alike. Her sporty and positive attitude inspires others, while she always puts people at the centre of her work.
At Vitahealth, Loïse is a lifestyle doctor: she assesses results and discusses them personally with participants, with the emphasis on what they can do themselves.
Rianne has worked in the medical and social domain for a long time and focuses mainly on connecting people, organisations and ideas to make care better. She gets energy from complex issues where different parties come together and where you can build something new together. Health and lifestyle have always had her attention. How do we make sure people do not only come into view once they get ill, but gain insight earlier and can work on their own health?
Rianne is a mother of three and loves a healthy and active lifestyle. She practises several sports, precisely because she enjoys the variety. At the same time she loves good company and a party: for her, in the end, it is all about the right balance.
What appeals to Rianne about Vitahealth is the combination of science, technology and lifestyle. Vitahealth makes health information concrete and understandable, so that people gain more insight into their own health and can take action sooner. She finds the connection between scientific research and what people can actually do in their daily lives especially valuable.
As programme manager, Rianne makes sure the different parts of Vitahealth come together and get off the ground. She connects healthcare professionals and partners and works on implementing Vitahealth in practice. Her focus is on creating an approach that is not only strong in content, but also really works for professionals and for people themselves.
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