Helsinki’s Radical Health Festival puts AI prevention on a governance leash

Tomi Laitinen of Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health moderates a session on interoperability and health data governance at the Radical Health Festival in Helsinki on Tuesday. (Credit: Korea Biomedical Review)

HELSINKI -- By Kim Ji-hye/Korea Biomedical Review correspondent -- On Tuesday, the opening minutes of a session on “Data and AI for Prevention and Precision Health” at the Radical Health Festival in Helsinki, Finland, began the way few health-policy gatherings do: Caroline Groothoff, introduced as a breathwork facilitator and executive coach, asked the audience to sit back, breathe in “light and ease,” and exhale “tightness and holding.”

It was a soft entry into a hard argument that surfaced again and again across the day’s conversations, from prevention to interoperability to climate: Europe can talk about “precision health” for another decade, but the shift only happens when governments make the boring parts mandatory.

Finland’s leaders presented the country as ready for that shift. Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, Finland’s Minister of Social Security, framed the bet plainly. The push, she said, is “precision health at scale,” using data, AI and “human insight” to move systems toward prevention and, ultimately, lower costs.

The premise was familiar to anyone watching health systems buckle under chronic disease: data, paired with artificial intelligence and analytics, can identify risk earlier and tailor prevention and care before symptoms spiral into complications. What the speakers emphasized, though, was less the promise than the price of making it routine.

On the prevention panel, Teemu Suna, the chief executive of Nightingale Health, sat alongside Janne Martikainen, a health economist who leads the UEF House of Effectiveness at the University of Eastern Finland, and Ilse Rauhaniemi, who oversees occupational health processes at Terveystalo, Finland’s largest private healthcare provider by network.

Martikainen put the tension in a single line: “You need to invest today and you might be rewarded in 10 to 15 years.” That gap, he said, runs into political cycles, budgeting cycles and the familiar problem that “somebody else” may be credited for the payoff.

Rauhaniemi described what it looks like when prevention is treated as operations rather than aspiration. Occupational health checkups are common in Finland, she said. Mehiläinen has made “metabolic risk assessment” part of a “workability management model,” turning screening into something that can be tracked, managed and revisited, not filed away as a one-off wellness exercise.

Suna argued that Finland’s advantage has been its willingness to build risk profiling and early intervention around individuals rather than institutions, then use data to target the groups most likely to benefit. The promise, he suggested, is not just better outcomes, but lower unit costs because the system is not spending the same intensity everywhere, all the time.

Florian Fuhrmann, chair of gematik’s management board, described how Germany paired new digital-health governance with policy changes meant to speed implementation. (Credit: Korea Biomedical Review)

Even in a room built around AI, the conversation kept snapping back to a more basic constraint. Prevention does not work if the data is thin, inconsistent or trapped in the wrong place. Several speakers reduced the problem to a warning label: “garbage in, garbage out.”

That same concern anchored a separate session on “Regulatory Approaches and Innovation for Interoperable Health Data Systems,” moderated by Tomi Laitinen of Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health.

Laitinen opened with his own version of the data-quality problem, invoking “coffee in and coffee out,” then pushing beyond it. Even high-quality data, he said, can be “messed up” by weak processes.

Germany’s speakers described what happens when a country tries to make data move across a fragmented software market without relying on voluntary goodwill.

Kira Tönnißen, a policy officer at Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health, said the country’s system landscape is “quite heterogeneous,” especially in outpatient care, with many systems and legacy standards that “often do not comply” with the standards policymakers want. Interoperability, she argued, cannot be treated as a technical aspiration. It needs governance, process and enforcement.

Her answer was a structure that sounds bureaucratic until you hear why it exists: a “conformity assessment” process that forces system providers to prove they meet interoperability requirements and earn a certificate signaling compliance to the market. Tönnißen said the process was designed because even standards that are legally binding were not being followed consistently.

The consequences were not theoretical. If physicians use a system that is not compliant, she said, they may not be able to bill for services. System providers can also face legal action that blocks them from placing products on the market.

She acknowledged the political difficulty of enforcement, but described the pressure as intentional: not to punish clinicians, but to force a market shift toward usable standards because interoperability is meant to make care safer and data usable for patients and physicians.

Florian Fuhrmann, chair of gematik’s management board, Germany’s national digital health agency, described how governance changes were paired with a policy turn.

For years, he said, gematik’s decision-making was stuck in a 50-50 split between payers and providers. In 2019, he said, the Health Ministry “took over 51 percent of the shares,” allowing faster decisions and a quicker push on national programs.

One of those pushes was the electronic health record. Fuhrmann said Germany moved from an opt-in model to an opt-out model, created roughly 70 million records within weeks, and saw refusal rates around 5 percent. He described a “mandatory use” rollout later that year, a sequence he framed as Germany trying to catch up after years of underinvesting in digitalization.

If Tönnißen offered the logic, Fuhrmann offered the enforcement story. He said compliance with the first wave of conformity assessment for outpatient billing software reached about 99 percent, and that noncompliant systems would be pushed out of the market, forcing remaining practices to switch.

For readers outside Europe’s digital health policy bubble, the subtext was legible. Prevention and AI do not scale without plumbing. The plumbing does not change without power, incentives and, at times, penalties.

Then the festival widened the frame again, toward a different constraint: carbon.

From left: Dr. Chiara Cadeddu (Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management), Dr. Hanna Haveri (Wellbeing Services County of Päijät-Häme), Elisa Frenz (Health Proc Europe), Dr. Jordi Serrano Pons (P8 Health) and Shane Fitch (Fundación Lovexair) during the festival’s One Health plenary in Helsinki. (Credit: Korea Biomedical Review)

In the “One Health” plenary, Shane Fitch, the CEO and founder of Spain’s Lovexair Foundation, joined a panel that included Hanna Haveri, a Finnish physician focused on planetary health; Elisa Frenz, head of the European procurement group Health Proc Europe; Jordi Serrano Pons, a digital health entrepreneur; and Chiara Cadeddu, an associate professor at Erasmus University’s School of Health Policy and Management and the session’s planetary health chair.

Frenz pointed to the part of healthcare emissions that procurement officers and hospital administrators quietly control. “Supply chains,” she said, are “more than fifty percent” of healthcare’s environmental footprint. Purchasing decisions determine what products are used, how far they travel and how they become waste.

Haveri offered a national yardstick. Finland’s healthcare sector, she said, accounts for about 4 percent of the country’s carbon footprint.

Cadeddu used a word that tightened the room: “an emergency.” An emergency is not a trend. It is a timeline.

By the end of Tuesday’s sessions, the festival’s through-line looked less like a slogan and more like a chain of dependencies. Prevention needs data. Data needs interoperability. Interoperability needs governance that can actually enforce standards. And every new digital layer, every model, every workflow still lands inside a health system that buys things, powers servers, ships devices and throws away waste.

The opening-keynote joke worked because it landed on a shared anxiety. Everyone wants to talk about the future. The harder question, echoed across these rooms in Helsinki, is whether the future can be built with the tools and trade-offs that exist right now.