The two Praevenire Digital Health Workshops 2019 and 2020 as well as the Digital Health Symposium 2021 in Stift Seitensteten (A) have resulted in Praevenire’s “Digital Twin Society Initiative”. The first results will be discussed at the next Digital Health Symposium in May 2022.

Digital twins are digital images of real world entities – be it machines, companies, people or events – which represent essential aspects of these entities in such a way that they can be analysed with mathematical algorithms and simulation tools. In healthcare, we are interested in the digital twins of people and their therapies, but also of hospitals and the healthcare system as a whole. The aim is to improve the organisation of healthcare, to research the effectiveness and side effects of therapies and to offer individual patients tailor-made preventive measures and therapies.

At the second PRAEVENIRE Digital Health Workshop in October 2020, the idea was born to realise the Digital Twin Society by 2030. This idea was concretised for the PRAEVENIRE Health Days 2021 and subsequently further developed into the PRAEVENIRE initiative “Digital Twin Society” on the basis of the results of the first Digital Health Symposium. The vision of the PRAEVENIRE initiative “Digital Twin Society” is that a comprehensive socio-technical digital health ecosystem will emerge in Austria by 2030. This should optimally support patient-oriented healthcare.

This means that the digital health ecosystem should enable customised care with the best possible individual outcome for each patient – taking into account the financial and social sustainability of this care. The mission of the PRAEVENIRE initiative “Digital Twin Society” is to contribute significantly to the realisation of the vision through concrete architectural proposals aimed at: prioritising recommended measures, propagating good practices from all over the world, communicating challenges and proven solutions in a comprehensible way and continuously developing methods for quality assurance.

The Digital Twin Society sees itself as a platform to bring together all those experts and stakeholders to successfully realise this mission. It is to be supported by a network of personalities who contribute their knowledge and skills to identifying and solving problems. By May 2022, a core team of experts will be formed to develop initial architecture and governance proposals. These proposals will be presented, evaluated and deepened at the second PRAEVENIRE Digital Health Symposium (16-17 May 2022 at the 7th PRAEVENIRE Health Days at Stift Seitenstetten and online).