On 14 January 2026, the EU Health Coalition - of which EHTEL is a member - met with the BeWell project, at a policy brunch, to explore together ways to build a European health workforce that is future-ready. The structured discussion brought together 30+  European Commission representatives, health attachés, policy makers, and workforce experts as well as representatives of health sector stakeholders – like EHTEL –  and regional authorities.

Framing the European health workforce crisis

The structured discussion asked questions around challenging topics, such as “Why now?”, workforce readiness, and the need for pressing financial investment.

Marc Lange, EHTEL’s General Secretary, addressed workforce readiness for digital transformation and European Health Data Space (EHDS) implementation. He included in his insights the need for digital skills, interoperable data use, and the simplification of regulatory frameworks (so as to avoid additional administrative burdens).

Key challenges

Marc articulated his message around these challenges:

• EHDS is a foundation for data sharing at scale and for speeding up the digital transformation of the health sector.
• Data sharing has some crucial aspects:

- It makes sense if data is understood and trusted by the data receiver.

- The data producer must “document for others”.

- A collaboration culture, is needed together with soft skills, including trust on both sides.

- In a digital world, semantic interoperability is also imperative.

• Data sharing has impacts for the people/personnel (or organisations) who contribute to the data sharing process, on:

- Work processes and distribution.

- The liability.

- The business models.

• Why should personnel/people document for others?

There is a need to pay attention to these vital criteria:

- The incentives needed.

- The tools that make it easy.

- Trust (and the need for proper data governance)

- Skills and a supporting team.

Semantic interoperability

On this type of interoperability especially:

• In January 2026, with the support of the EHDS implementers’ task force, EHTEL produced two working papers.

- Working Paper 2 was on high-quality and structured data.

- Working Paper 3 was on making the best use of algorithm-based tools.

Earlier video insights into EHDS challenges

A year ago, on 25 January 2025, Marc Lange also contributed to the EU Health Summit’s insights on reshaping health for a stronger Europe insights.

The EHDS provides tremendous opportunities. Marc also, however, focused on the fact that “the proof of the pudding is [in] the eating” when he outlined the numerous challenges that face European Member States in implementing the EHDS.

On the one hand, these challenges include dealing with interoperability and with legacy systems and, on the other, being completely new to creating data spaces and mnot having the needed expertise and capacity. Ultimately, “that will really be challenging for everyone”.

Watch this 2-minute video on digital transformation and the EHDS.

Read in more detail, EHTEL’s January 2026 Working paper on blind spots and pain points for implementers, which contains similar arguments to these January 2025 insights.