Healthcare 5.0 - A revolution for a healthy planet?: Keynote speech from Lucien Engelen

Across our economy and throughout society technology is driving breakthroughs that could help sustain our planet. Disruptive innovations in clean transportation, smart cities and renewable energy are enabling better resource management and reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Digital technologies, in particular, are increasingly being deployed to improve environmental sustainability.

But what about the healthcare sector? The COVID pandemic caused a rapid shift towards the remote delivery of care in Europe through online technologies. However, the potential for digital technology to transform the health and social care system has still not been fully realised. What does the future hold? What can be learnt from other sectors? And to what extent can the application of innovative digital technologies help create a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient healthcare sector in Europe?

In this opening keynote session, leading global digital health expert Lucien Engelen will be sharing his insights on the current state of play of digital technology in health and exploring the opportunities that smart technologies and artificial intelligence offer in achieving sustainable healthcare goals. He will explain how digital technology is already leading to improvements in healthcare in Europe, through patient empowerment and streamlining of services, but also how these solutions are helping to reduce the environmental burden of care. He will challenge us to consider why digital health and sustainable healthcare are so often seen as independent agendas, and whether planetary health and health system sustainability need to become more central to future digital health strategies, and health policy more generally, in Europe.

Lucien will be followed by Roy Jakobs, Chief Business Leader Connected Care at Philips, who will outline how Philips is already taking concrete action to address societal and environmental challenges in healthcare through digital innovation. Through circular, cloud and service-based business models and innovations in telehealth, and in close collaboration with its customers and supply chain partners, the company is already contributing to more resilient and sustainable healthcare systems.