10:00 o’clock: The HIP Summit 2025 kicks off! An impressive opening show on the ice of the SAP Arena in Munich greets vitagroup’s 150 partners, customers and employees. In short video messages, Kamilo Kolarz, CEO of vitagroup, and Judith Gerlach, the Bavarian State Minister for Health, Care and Prevention, set the tone for this gathering, emphaisisng the importance of the digital transformation of healthcare.

10:45 o’clock: Dr Nils Hellrung – Director Strategy & Operations at vitagroup welcomes the guests and highlights the mission of today’s summit: to jointly emphasise the importance of having good health data available. The data is the basis that makes digitalisation in healthcare, including AI-supported decision-making, possible in the first place.

Impressive Keynote Speeches

First Keynote Speech: “The Future of Patient Engagement: Informed Patients Sharing the Work“. Dave deBronkart – known as e-patient Dave – gave an impassioned speech about the remarkable changes that happen when patients can access information. He reflected on his own experience of surviving stage IV kidney cancer because he was able to access the information that was outside medical libraries. “This is a cultural change, not just a tech one. All these things are truly altering how patients interact with their health and with their doctors.”

In the next Speech, “Data is the new infrastructure for healthcare,” Rachel Dunscombe, CEO of openEHR international, reemphasised the importance of data quality and data availability in healthcare, especially in light of AI. “Data is the new infrastructure for health systems. That infrastructure allows care to be delivered.” And Rachel continued to say that in order to take that “barrel data” and turn it into information that we can innovate on and that is suitable for AI, we need flexible, vendor-neutral, ever green, semantical technology that we can keep building and that can support an ecosystem of apps be it from citizens or healthcare institutions.

Henning Schneider, CIO of the Asklepios Clinic Group, was unfortunately unable to attend in person. Due to a car accident on his way to our HIP Summit, he joined virtually. The visionary of digital transformation in hospitals talked about the current challenges in clinics and the Asklepios Group’s drive to invest massively in digitalisation. His keynote speech, “A Vision for Digital Healthcare: The Health Data Hub of Asklepios Kliniken,” focused on the necessity of structuring health data to unlock its full potential. ‘With the help of new technologies, we will finally be able to make more out of the data. We will experience a small revolution in the near future because – and also thanks to vitagroup’s Health Intelligence Platform – we will soon have the opportunity to really have access to health data. We firmly believe that digitalisation is one of the biggest levers for improving both the quality of medical care and the efficiency of care provision, as well as for counteracting the shortage of skilled workers.” Together, Asklepios Kliniken is currently developing a catalog to harmonize data, structure it, and transform unstructured data into structured data – ultimately enabling the application of AI solutions.

“Data is an asset, not a burden”, said Monica Jones, Chief Data Officer, University Leeds und Associate Director, HDR UK North in the final keynote speech “A Roadmap to Data Maturity: A Practical Guide for CIOs to Maximise the Valuable Use of Data” before the lunch break. She also reiterated the importance of getting the data strategy right when undergoing digital transformation. “If you get data strategy right, you have good quality data for population management, AI, and research.”

Exciting Workshops

The afternoon with our customers and partners continues with exciting workshops from EY and Digital Avantgarde – as the pictures show, there was a lot of interest!

Our Pitch Slam on the HIP ecosystem was equally well attended – many thanks to the presentations from:

• Urs Wittwer, Healthbrain Corp
• Tom McKinnon, Big Picture Medical
• Jürke Hartz, myScribe GmbH
• Timur Kaya, Dillingen-Wertingen district hospitals
• Sidharth Ramesh, Medblocks
• Hans Canisius, USoft
• Sofia Kauppila, Tietoevry
• Hanna Pohjonen, Rosaldo Oy.

Keynote Speeches: Prof. Christian Karagiannidis und Josep Antoni Mira Palacios

Overcrowded emergency rooms with repeated patient visits and a growing shortage of medical staff are some of the current challenges in German emergency rooms, that Prof. Christian Karagiannidis notes in his keynote speech. The chief senior physician and head of the ECMO centre at Cologne Hospital sees one approach to a solution. ‘AI does not replace medical professionals – but it serves as a tireless advisor 24/7’. Emergency departments, where triage system is clearly defined, are well positioned to adopt AI models, he said, adding that this will help reduce burden on staff, it will make work more efficient and diagnosis faster.

Josep Antoni Mira Palacios, Chief Architect at the Telecommunications and Information Technology Center (CTTI – Centre de Telecomunicacions i Tecnologies de la Informació), at the Department of Health at Government of Catalonia, presented the technical complexity of the Catalonia open platform supported by HIP, with some incredible stats that highlight HIP’s capabilities:

• 1.2 billion compositions on the CDR currently from legacy shared Clinical Repository with 48 billion archetypes stored
• 223 templates designed (106 of them only for PROMS)
• 20M compositions expected to be stored monthly (WiP)

After a great summary of all our speeches and workshops by Dr Nils Hellrung, the relaxed part of the day begins.

Dinner, drinks and pleasant conversations

Now it’s time for dinner, drinks, good music and pleasant conversations. Many thanks to all speakers, participants and colleagues for a thoroughly successful vitagroup HIP Summit 2025!