Building Europe’s Health Resilience for a Stronger Future
This year the European Health Forum Gastein took place on 29 September – 2 October 2026 and brought together clinicians, policymakers, industry, and people with lived experience, with the commitment to translating ideas into actions.
Europe’s health systems are being asked to do two difficult things at once: extend healthy life expectancy and reduce health inequalities and prepare for shocks that move faster than institutions can respond. We convened a session with the University of Copenhagen on 30 September exploring how convergence science, digital twins and testbeds could help Europe improve prevention and health every day while strengthening preparedness for future shocks.
Drawing on the concepts of unexpected Black Swan events and high-impact Grey Rhino risks, this session convened leaders from across sectors to discuss actionable solutions that can enhance Europe’s resilience and capacity to respond to emerging challenges. Convergence science provides the operating model: bringing together disciplines, sectors and lived experience around a shared mission from the outset. Testbeds and digital twins are part of the infrastructure that makes this operational. Testbeds allow interventions, technologies and policies to be studied and evaluated in real-world settings; digital twins allow systems and choices to be represented, simulated and stress-tested before implementation. Linking the two creates a recurrent learning loop between real-world and in-silico evidence. Built well, this infrastructure can accelerate scientific discovery and translation while strengthening preparedness, equity and trust.
The session closed on a shared conclusion: resilience is not built in the midst of disruption. The foundations for resilience across Europe must be built now, long before they are needed.
Read the event summary article here
View the video of the session below
Our session at European Health Forum Gastein 2026
For more information read the publication created by School of Convergence Science Director Professor Anthony Bull and Health and Technology Co-Directors Professors Marisa Miraldo, Iain McNeish and Faith Osier below.
Convergence science for a resilient Europe: turning testbeds, twins and data into action (publication)
Key messages from the publication:
- Black swans and grey rhinos need the same fix. Sudden shock or long-ignored risk - the real gap is the same: no systematic way to produce usable evidence under pressure.
- Testbeds + digital twins. Testbeds let us validate innovations once, across multiple settings, instead of repeating pilots country by country. Digital twins let us stress-test a policy before we commit to it.
- The pieces exist, the glue doesn't. Europe has the Health Data Space, EuroHPC, the Virtual Human Twins Initiative - what's missing is the integrating discipline that turns data, computing and models into decisions.