Health prevention has been described as an absolute priority ever since the Ottawa Charter was approved 40 years ago at a 1986 WHO conference. But the last decades have produced limited results. By linking prevention and prediction, digital health technology offers the opportunity to make a real breakthrough. In July 2026, therefore, COMFORTage, a four-year long large-scale European project, coordinated the publication of a new policy brief.

COMFORTage itself focuses on personalising solutions for people who experience dementia or frailty. Its seven-page policy brief zooms in on “Making Prevention Work: A New Operating Model for Digital Health in Europe”. The brief consolidates evidence and material from a wide range of sources to put forward its recommendations.

The brief in a nutshell

The brief makes several essential points to position its argument about the need for prevention: key messages; core interventions; means of overcoming barriers; and what should be done explicitly by policymakers, health providers, and innovators and industry. It also presents the opportunity to engage new stakeholders, such as pharmacists and community workers, formally in new approaches. It draws on plenty of concrete results, facts, and figures which, besides the COMFORTage project itself, it has extracted from three other EU-financed projects and international publications.

In a world in which innovation is permanent, the brief advocates the need for a new circular policy model to prevention. The model’s approach advocates the point that policy leads, developers and implementers need to abandon the traditional linear approach to policy and, instead, to privilege a virtuous circle – so that innovation, implementation, and evidence interact continuously.

Source: Extracted from “From a linear pipeline to an iterative, operating model” (Figure 2, p4)

The brief in more detail

Making Prevention Work launches its arguments with five key messages (p1).

Prevention is now vital. The chief remaining bottleneck, however, is implementation. Responses to handling the implementation bottleneck need to take place in parallel, not in sequence. Three concrete pathways are already delivering (the brief calls the evidence “proof points”) – two are from Catalonia in Spain and one is a more pan-European approach. They are community-first deployment (Barcelona, Catalonia), tiered validation (PREDICTOM, Europe), and policy -led adoption (Catalonia, Spain) (p4).

The brief supplies plenty of interesting learnings that have emerged from four European Union-funded projects. They provide persuasive evidence on how to assist not only the prevention of dementia and frailty, but also policy development in health and care more generally.

Two of the projects, COMFORTage and PREDICTOM, are ongoing and will end in 2027. Hence, one might anticipate to read more about the application of the policy brief suggestions in their work. The brief’s arguments are also underpinned by work by the WHO Innovation Agenda for Public Health in the European Region 2025-2030 and OECD analyses of policies for people with dementia.

As an example of what works, the brief cites the solution deployed in community pharmacies and residential centres in the Barcelona region of Catalonia, Spain, by the Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona (p4). It is a speech-related biomarker which takes just three minutes to run.

As a result, six core interventions are suggested. The first three have distinct digital and data orientations: they relate to the need for personalised health metrics, holistic health records, and digital platforms. The other three insist on the need for early intervention, community engagement, and ethical safeguards.

The call from the four projects for structured, policy-led adoption frameworks converges with the WHO’s systematic warning of the need for “mission partnerships”, ethical and inclusive data infrastructure, and workforce empowerment.

The brief suggests the need to overcome two clusters of barriers which are both systemic and individual. The text is explicit about two possible remedies. For the first, it is about identifying and making use of multimodal data to support personalised prevention. For the second, individual behavioural resistance may often limit participation in preventive interventions even when services are available. Hence, personalised feedback can make prevention more relevant and actionable. Three examples of useful data include elements such as biological age, individual risk profiles, and AI-supported lifestyle recommendations.

Here are the suggestions about what should be done by the three groups of stakeholders:

• Policymakers: Build the foundation
• Healthcare providers: Embrace new roles and tools
• Innovators and industry: Design for impact (p5).

Ultimately, in particular, policymakers need to back three solid actions (p5): the reform of procurement, investment in interoperable infrastructure, and the bringing into prevention of new actors.

The brief concludes with a focus on a virtuous circle

The future of digital prevention, in particular, lies in this new circular, interactive and iterative approach to implementation, innovation, and evidence. The four projects – COMFORTage, iHelp, PREDICTOM, and PROPHET – which feature in the brief all show that this model can function in practice. The working examples are obvious: they range from Barcelona’s pharmacies to Catalonia’s certification pipeline. It is therefore definitely possible for Europe to shift from reactive to proactive care. The continent and its nations can both improve health and care outcomes and secure health systems’ sustainability. Thus, the brief ends with the argument, “The time to act is now.” (p7).

For more information

For your further viewing and reading interest:

On 26 May 2026, presenters from the COMFORTage and PREDICTOM projects featured in a COMFORTage community forum webinar, complete with videos, organised by EHTEL here. 

On 5 June 2026, Health Management, a pan-European journal, published this earlier view on policy development by EHTEL’s, Luc Nicolas, and colleagues on putting early action prevention into people’s own hands here.

From November 1986, here is the text of the Ottawa Charter on Health Prevention.