2026 DHAGE Meeting: Navigating Transformation Under Pressure: Mind the Gaps
The Digital Health Advisory Group for Europe (DHAGE) held its 8th annual High-Level Meeting at HIMSS26 Europe Conference & Exhibition in Copenhagen under the theme of Navigating Transformation Under Pressure: Mind the Gaps.
The 2026 DHAGE High-Level Meeting applied a structured gap analysis to identify the factors preventing digital health transformation from reaching its full potential across Europe. The discussion examined the deeper barriers that prevent reforms from taking hold, funding from scaling, and innovation from translating into measurable impact. The objective was to move beyond diagnosis and turn shared insights into actionable outcomes, including priority actions, practical tools, and clearer pathways for policy and implementation.
DHAGE members identified a broad set of over twenty system-level challenges affecting Europe’s digital health landscape. Following a prioritisation process, a final shortlist of eight gaps was selected for the discussion at the 2026 High-Level Meeting, combining core systemic gaps with high national priority gaps.
These included:
- Insufficient preparedness for geopolitical and systemic shocks
- Unaddressed systemic cybersecurity vulnerabilities
- EHDS (European Health Data Space) and AI data infrastructure gaps, limited interoperability across European countries
- Fragmented and misaligned AI policy and governance structures
- AI skill gap in the healthcare workforce
- Weak economic justification for digital investments
- Innovation-to-Scale Gap: Mismatch between Digital Innovation Pace, Governance Capacity, and System Adoption (incl. HTA)
- Supplier compliance and market function
The report focuses not only on obvious technical and regulatory barriers that health systems face, but also on the underlying conditions and interdependencies that influence resilience, trust, accountability, and system learning. It examines what keeps specific gaps in place, what actions could help to close them, who needs to act and how progress could be measured. The aim is to present concrete policy directions and implementation pathways that could support both national efforts and European alignment.
The resulting DHAGE Gap-to-Action Matrix shows that Europe’s digital health barriers are more interconnected than they first appear. Rather than pointing to a collection of separate issues, the analysis revealed a layered set of gaps operating across system readiness, impact delivery, and deeper institutional and cultural foundations. It also points to a smaller set of recurring cross-cutting dimensions, especially cross-border coordination and alignment, governance and regulatory coherence, trust and accountability, and the broader conditions for implementation and scale, that connect different gaps and help explain why progress remains uneven across countries and policy areas.
The matrix further shows that several priority gaps converge around a smaller number of shared system pressures and policy concerns, including resilience, safe deployment, sustainability, scale, and value realisation. At the same time, the proposed priority actions are more concentrated than the gaps themselves, clustering around governance coordination, capability-building, standards and implementation guidance, evidence and evaluation, and market-shaping.
Taken together, the gap-related priority actions and the DHAGE Gap-to-Action Matrix provide a practical basis to inform policy and implementation efforts by the European Commission, OECD, WHO, international organisations, and national governments, while also highlighting where coordinated action and shared ownership may be needed to support more effective digital health transformation across Europe.
DHAGE continued to serve as a strategic platform for thought leadership among Europe’s key policymakers, bringing together ministries and national authorities, European institutions, and international organisations to address the growing pressure faced by health systems in delivering digital transformation in an increasingly demanding policy, economic, and geopolitical environment. Jointly organised by HIMSS, the Finnish Ministry for Social Affairs and Health, and Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS), Portugal, the 2026 meeting provided a trusted forum to exchange national perspectives, identify shared priorities, and pave the way for more coordinated responses to complex digital health challenges.
From Gaps to Action: Five Strategic Insights from DHAGE 2026
These five strategic insights synthesise the main conclusions emerging from the DHAGE 2026 gap analysis, the Policy Sprint discussions, and the DHAGE Gap-to-Action Matrix.
1. Digital health transformation is now a governance challenge, not a technology challenge.
The greatest barriers identified by DHAGE are no longer technological. They relate to governance, leadership, implementation capacity, and institutional coordination needed to translate digital ambition into sustainable health system transformation.
2. Europe must shift from designing policies to implementing them at scale.
With major legislative frameworks now in place, the next priority is supporting countries in implementation through practical guidance, shared tools, interoperability, and coordinated action.
3. AI readiness begins with strong digital health foundations.
Successful AI adoption depends on high-quality health data, interoperable infrastructure, capable workforces, robust governance, and public trust and not on AI technologies alone.
4. Resilience, trust, and interoperability are shared European responsibilities.
Cybersecurity, preparedness, EHDS implementation, and cross-border data exchange require coordinated action across countries, institutions, and stakeholders to strengthen collective resilience.
5. Closing a few systemic gaps can unlock progress across many policy priorities.
The DHAGE Gap-to-Action Matrix shows that targeted action on governance, implementation capacity, standards, workforce, and evidence can simultaneously accelerate digital transformation across multiple domains.