Reflections from Europe’s healthcare innovation conference 2026

6 July 2026

Healthcare

Last month we attended HLTH, Europe’s largest healthcare innovation conference, dedicated to exploring the continent’s healthcare challenges and opportunities.

Here are some themes that stood out to us.

Cleo and Emma attending HLTH 2026 in Amsterdam

Designing for equity and inclusion in healthcare

Healthcare systems must be designed in a way which doesn’t exclude or leave anyone behind. This starts by fundamentally questioning who has designed the systems we use, and who they have been designed for.

This quote from Tendayi Achiume as shared by Dr Sujitha Selvarajah, particularly stood out: “Technology is not neutral or objective. It is fundamentally shaped by the racial, ethnic, gender and other inequalities prevalent in society, and typically makes these inequalities worse.”

As Jenny Shand pointed out, we need a more sophisticated approach to measuring the value and ROI of equity. “We reached 10k users” is not the same as “we improved access for people who were previously excluded.” If we anchor ourselves in the specific outcomes we want to achieve, we can truly measure whether we are driving meaningful progress and impact.

An excellent panel featuring Joana Hauff, Ayesha Rahim, Dr Naveen Puri and John Chinegwundoh drew attention to the need to frame exclusion as what it is: a healthcare underperformance issue. Not designing for equity or inclusion risks greater risks, greater complaints, and poorer outcomes for patients.

The potential to reimagine healthcare

While much of the conference’s discussion focused on AI, speakers like Penny Dash and Joep de Groot highlighted a broader issue: focusing solely on deploying new technology within existing frameworks misses the opportunity to rethink what future healthcare could look like.

As Joep said: “we’re trying to keep the old models of care whilst introducing something new on top of it”. We need to fundamentally rethink the processes of healthcare delivery, not just try and layer technologies on top of care models from a different era.

Penny Dash cited NHS Online as an example of trying to make this step-change by looking at the problem holistically, not just from a technology lens.

The challenge of making AI work within specific organisational contexts

Many of the organisations we spoke to are using AI to enhance their services and operations. But most found that the real challenge lies not in deploying the technology itself, but in managing the organisational change required to capture the benefit of it.

All the AI-focused sessions we attended placed this organisational challenge front and centre, with speakers focusing on outdated operating models, governance, and culture as being the biggest barriers to AI adoption and scaling.

Our experience at PD shows that the organisations best positioned to leverage AI are those that have built the right underlying environment - one designed to experiment with new technologies, learn what works, and scale successes. This foundational work is more difficult, but delivers infinitely more value, than simply deploying a tool.