Recovery/Resilience Agenda: Integration of digital health in the EU healthcare systems

The medical technology (medtech) industry has made significant efforts on various fronts to help manage the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. While providing essential solutions like testing and protective equipment, the industry has observed developments in digital health and proposes a vision for how digital health technologies can help accelerate the recovery and build more sustainable European healthcare systems.

The current paper offers observations on how the pandemic has impacted digital health in Europe, namely via:

• a transition to online consultations and remote monitoring;
• the introduction of contact tracing apps;
• the realisation of certain shortcomings of the status quo;
• a new openness to digital health by EU citizens.

Capitalising on this and looking into the future, we are offering specific recommendations for building on this momentum, in order to serve sustainable recovery and economic resilience, namely:

• keep and build upon digital health measures, introduced during the pandemic;
• advance the European Health Data Space;
• improve incentives and reimbursement of digital health;
• create new models for developing and deploying AI for more sustainable healthcare.