Report:
The Future health and health care 2025

This expo and conference focused on the crucial future issues within health care with this year’s contents centered on AI. More than 200 speakers, from industry experts and authorities to local successes from all over Sweden shared their views on the latest developments in healthcare. The program, including three minister talks, generated a very high number of visitors.

Highlights

• Setting the stage was Acko Ankarberg Johansson, Sweden’ Minister of Health. She spoke about how we can future-proof Swedish healthcare is about what can be done to make the patients’ lives better, by identifying what is not working well, small or larger, and do something about it. She encouraged us to challenge the everyday systems as they are the core. Another part was to remember the employees and specifically, their needs for and opportunities to continue education. The new Gränby project was mentioned as a successful example of new development, pinpointing that ease of parking and the value of, when possible, getting treatment outside of the hospital setting are yet so important for patients. (Link? The Gränby Project – The government’s work for more accessible and patient-centered cancer care – Adxto)
  
  
• AI at the Swedish Medicines Agency – a high speed, passionate presentation by Gabriel Westman how the authority has had the opportunity to build, and quality assure its own AI, to assist with regulatory tasks within the pharmaceutical area, with support from Vinnova. This work to date has generated several tools of which one is a system to avoid medication confusion through computer vision. A few (of many) applications of AI in health care are within decision support, medical guidance, image diagnostics and precision medicine.
  
  
• Gunilla Nordlöf, Director-general at the Swedish eHealth Agency said that Sweden aims to be number one in digital health and that the key to this is access to data, and that this will be needed regardless of exactly how future Swedish health care will look like. A national infrastructure will be required with standards and frameworks, to make the data and information available in all our systems today, accessible, as well as collaboration.
  
  
• Frequently mentioned and discussed from various angles was the European Health Data Area (EHDS) – could this initiative realize the (full) potential of health data? EHDS will provide the conditions for healthcare providers in the Union to exchange data and create new research and innovation opportunities through access to a common European database of health data. The implementation of this will be a hot topic in the coming months as each member state begins its preparations. (Link: https://www.european-health-data-space.com/)
  
  
• Another perspective; Stefan Sonesson from Mercy ships spoke of how they intend to change the access to surgery in one generation and the true impact the volunteers of Mercy ships have when they support the people of various African countries with consultations and surgical procedures for free, all provided through donations. (https://mercyships.se/)
  
  
• Appreciated for how personally it was presented was Sweden’s Minister of Social Affairs, Jakob Forssmed, talk on National digital infrastructure for healthcare – a reform for increased accessibility, quality, and patient safety.