Dr. Lars Lindsköld, President of the European Federation for Medical Informatics, Board Member of Swedish Federation for Medical Informatics, and Senior Advisor at SciLifeLab and Uppsala University, participated in the Global Health System Redesign Lab, an initiative of the Global Commission for 21st Century Healthcare (GC21CH), organized by Health Parliament on the sidelines of the 79th World Health Assembly.
Read his full speech here:
Good morning, colleagues, friends, and fellow architects of our future health systems. Thank you to Rajendra and the Health Parliament for convening this vital Global Health System Redesign Lab on the sidelines of the 79th World Health Assembly.
As we gather today to reimagine healthcare for the 21st century, we must ask ourselves: what are the key elements that will define this future?
In the past, we built systems around acute, episodic sickness. Tomorrow’s architecture must be proactive, focusing on lifelong health and preventing disease before it starts. But to achieve this global continuum of care, we need a fundamental enabler: Standards.
Standards make it possible for us to understand each other. They ensure that semantics give our data real meaning. As we say in the European Federation for Medical Informatics, interoperability is not just technical; it is ethical. Without shared meaning, there can be no real sharing. We cannot build a global health ecosystem if our systems speak different, untranslatable languages.
This brings us to the new player on the field: Artificial Intelligence. We talk about AI constantly, but we need to demystify what it actually represents in our daily clinical lives. I like to look at AI through three different lenses:
First, AI can simply be Additional Information. It is something extra—a data point or a suggestion that I might not necessarily need to care about if my clinical judgment says otherwise.
Second, it can be Augmented Information. This is reinforced, highly relevant information that surfaces invisible signals—information that I must take into account in my continued workflow to ensure patient safety and precision.
And finally, AI can stand for Augmented Influencer. An entity that actively guides systems and behaviors toward better health outcomes—and honestly, who wouldn’t want to be an augmented influencer for global health? [pause – smile]
But amidst all this technological marvel, we must remember one crucial thing: We must not forget to think.
Algorithms are rules without wisdom; they turn data into action, but they never question right or wrong. Humans need humans to become humans, and AI is not solved by AI alone. It is our human values, our ethics, and our clinical judgment that must remain at the steering wheel. Technology is an enabler of better care, not a substitute for human thought.
Because of this shift, the healthcare workforce of 2050 will look vastly different. We will see the emergence of new, interdisciplinary medical specialities driven by AI and data. As an example, We will be able to prevent Osteoporosis and diabetes on a much earlier stage, and l a lot of other common sicknesses. These are roles that barely have curricula today, but they will be essential tomorrow, thanks to the sharing of health data points and not only sick data points😊
To prepare for this, we at EFMI are deeply engaged in building the necessary intellectual engines. Through our Knowledge Graph Project, we are making our wealth of medical informatics knowledge accessible, reusable, and FAIR. Knowledge graphs allow us to structure semantic units and map out hidden patterns—because, as we know, humans have a natural understanding for identifying relationships.
We are also investing in the future through our LEAD program—a European capacity-building incubator for young informatics leaders. We are teaching them to look beyond the visible, to handle complex health ecosystems, and to ensure that governance and human values evolve alongside technology.
As we build this new digital infrastructure, we must confront a growing paradox. In our quest for total transparency and data capture, we risk turning trust into a synonym for surveillance.
Today, every action, every clinical decision, and every spoken word is permanently stored on a hard drive. We have chatbots and algorithms capable of digging up any past statement or data point to challenge what we want to achieve right now. But if people—patients and professionals alike—feel constantly monitored and judged by their historical data, they become cautious. They stop taking risks. And caution, my friends, is the enemy of transformation.
True trust is not the certainty of being constantly watched. Trust is the freedom to be human—to learn, to adapt, and sometimes to be imperfect. Algorithms possess perfect memory, but they lack the capacity for forgiveness and contextual wisdom.
So, as we look to the future of the 21st-century healthcare system, let us move from a proliferation of tools to purposeful progress. Let us use AI to augment our intelligence, but never to let it hold us hostage to our own data.
We must design architecture and practices that protect our right to evolve together. Because the future of health is not just about building systems that care to remember. It is about building systems that remember to care.
Thank you for the attention.
Lars Lindskold
President European Federation for Medical Informatics
Board Member SFMI
Senior adviser SciLifeLab DC, Uppsala University
