Field notes from HIMSS Europe 2026 in Copenhagen

Endless smart device data

My smartwatch knows more about my body on an average Tuesday than my hospital does. It tracks how I slept, how hard my heart worked on a run, whether I am trending in the wrong direction before I feel anything at all. The institution with the doctors, the scanners and a century of clinical knowledge mostly meets me when something has already gone wrong.

I went to European Health Conference & Exhibition HIMSS in Copenhagen last week carrying that contradiction around with me, and I came back fairly convinced it is the most important problem in healthcare right now.

Prevention over intervention

What struck me was how widely the instinct was shared. I talked with hospital innovation leaders, government technology chiefs, quality and risk directors, academics who study how care actually gets delivered, and people whose job is to fund the next decade of it. They sat in different systems and different countries, public and private, large and small. Yet the same sentence kept surfacing in different words.

Care has to shift from catching people when they fall to keeping them well over time.

One person framed it as the difference between a hospital and a fitness tracker. Another described their institution choosing between becoming a place for long term health and becoming a pure intervention centre, with very little room left in between. The vision, it turns out, is not the hard part. Almost everyone already agrees on where this is going.

The hard part is underneath. The further these conversations went, the more they came back to the same unglamorous word; plumbing. One technology leader I met had moved deliberately out of a very large system and into a smaller one precisely so he could fix the foundations before chasing anything clever. His priority was not artificial intelligence. It was getting the data to flow, getting governance right, getting the basic infrastructure sound enough that the exciting things could one day stand on top of it. That gap, between the future everyone wants and the plumbing nobody celebrates, is the real story of digital health right now.

The layer that makes prevention possible

There was a second thread that I keep returning to. One Quality And Risk leader described her role as a translator. She sits between the people building the tools and the clinicians who have to trust them, and she pointed out that most technology never crosses that gap cleanly. The question she kept asking was deceptively simple. Where does an AI tool actually sit inside a hospital's existing clinical risk framework? Most vendors can describe the model in detail. Very few have a credible answer for how it lives inside the governance, the accountability and the daily clinical reality of a real institution. That answer is not a feature. It is the whole job.

Put those threads together and you get a fairly clear picture of where the work is. The destination is broadly agreed. Healthcare is moving, slowly and unevenly, from reacting to events towards managing health over time. What is missing almost everywhere is the layer underneath that makes it possible. Data that connects, governance that holds and an infrastructure that a clinician can trust on a Tuesday morning without thinking about it.

Longitudinal approach

That is the layer we work on. Not the model on top, which is the part that gets the attention, but the foundation underneath, which is the part that decides whether any of it survives contact with a real hospital. Copenhagen did not change my mind about that. It just showed me, conversation after conversation, how many people across the system are quietly arriving at the same conclusion.

I left with a full notebook and a clearer sense of the work ahead. The future of care is longitudinal. The thing standing between us and it is the plumbing. That is a less exciting sentence than most of what gets said on a conference stage. It also happens to be true.