Digital Twins and AI in Personalised Healthcare: from Innovation to Implementation and Impact
At the recent DT4PH symposium hosted by KU Leuven, leading voices from academia, EU policy, and industry convened to examine how digital twins in healthcare can move medicine toward more precise, predictive, and personalised care.
Digital Twins (DT) and AI are rapidly moving from promising concepts to real-world tools with the potential to transform personalised healthcare. However, recent economic analyses clearly showed a strong imbalance between the stakeholders carrying the cost of the implementation and those benefiting from its implementation.
The DT4PH 2026 event brought together the Belgian ecosystem of Digital Twins in healthcare to explore how these innovations can be responsibly implemented, scaled, and sustained—delivering measurable value for patients, healthcare providers, and society. The program spans the full Digital Twin life cycle: from state-of-the-art technologies and clinical adoption to regulatory readiness, incentivisation, and long-term impact. Key opinion leaders from academia, research organisations, industry, hospitals, patients, national and European policy, and regulatory agencies discussed the benefits, challenges and open questions around uptake in hospitals, opportunity costs, and alignment of incentives. During the breaks, participants could engage with researchers and technology developers that were showcasing their developments through demos and poster presentations.
To summarise the day in 3 keywords, it would be need, share and incentivise. Need refers to the identification of needs of patients and clinicians (unmet, obvious and hidden needs) that should drive technology development in a societal pull and not just the technology push. Share refers to the sharing of data and other resources, best practices (regulatory, uptake) and knowledge (training, engagement). The third concept that was frequently mentioned was incentivization, to make sure all stakeholders understand how they can benefit from the efforts that are requested.
Bringing together the entire ecosystem while relevant technological developments, policies and regulations are still in development presented an excellent opportunity to educate, ask questions and work on the alignment of all initiatives that are relevant for Digital Twins in health and care.
