The world doesn’t need another app. It needs courage, and the willingness to build the data foundations that make better care possible everywhere.
This week at Web Summit, surrounded by thousands of people talking about what’s next, one theme kept surfacing in every conversation: data.
Not dashboards or databases, but data as the connective tissue that links people, systems and whole countries.
It’s easy to treat data as a competitive advantage, something to lock down. But if healthcare is going to move beyond reactive models, data can’t stay trapped in silos or legacy systems built for protection instead of connection.
The future of health depends on what we choose to share.
For decades, healthcare has been shaped around treating illness once it appears. The system rewards activity, not outcomes. But a new generation of technology is flipping that on its head.
AI, digital biomarkers, connected devices and the next wave of personal health records all rely on data that moves. When data flows, insight follows. And when insight follows, care shifts from reactive to proactive.
We all say “right care, right place, right time”, but that isn’t achieved by adding another app.
It starts with the foundations that allow trusted, secure, real-time data exchange across the whole system.
Interoperability isn’t a buzzword. It’s infrastructure for dignity.
Dignity in care isn’t only about compassion, it’s about context. A clinician shouldn’t have to guess what’s happened before. A patient shouldn’t have to retell their story at every touchpoint. And governments shouldn’t have to wait months to understand the health of their communities.
When systems speak to each other, people are seen sooner, conditions are managed earlier, and resources go where they matter most.
This shift is generational.
We’re moving from institutional health to individual health. The tech is here to deliver genuinely personalised, predictive care at scale, but only if we share the right data safely and meaningfully.
That’s the challenge and the opportunity.
The countries and companies that treat data sharing as a public good, not a private asset, will lead the next decade. Those that don’t will keep solving the same problems alone.
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At Web Summit, I spoke with founders from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, all working on the same idea: turning data into insight and insight into action. The common thread wasn’t competition. It was connection.
Healthcare innovation won’t stay local. It’s already becoming borderless. Chronic disease doesn’t respect geography, and our solutions shouldn’t either.
Sharing data safely means building trust, with governance and consent that travel with the data. But trust shouldn’t become an excuse to stand still.
The old idea that data should be guarded for commercial advantage is fading. The new value lies in collaboration, in building ecosystems where everyone benefits from better, earlier, more precise care.
We’re seeing a new economic model take shape, where shared data underpins shared outcomes. When insights scale across systems and borders, the cost of care falls and quality rises. That’s not idealism. It’s the reality of modern health economics.
We’re on the edge of something bigger than digital transformation. This is a redesign of how we think about health itself: from system-centred to human-centred, from closed to open, from delayed to proactive.
And it starts with one choice: to share.
Healthcare isn’t a zero-sum game. Every time we choose connection over competition, the whole system gets stronger for clinicians, for patients and for the next generation who will expect nothing less.
The world doesn’t need another app. It needs courage, and the willingness to build the data foundations that make better care possible everywhere.
Danielle Bancroft is the managing director and founder of Off Label Consulting, and is product strategy advisor for Semantic Consulting.
This article was first published on Ms Bancroft’s LinkedIn profile. Read the original here.