Between July and August 2026, BRITE-EU partners convened stakeholder focus groups in six national ecosystems – Portugal, Spain, Romania, Serbia, Czechia and Sweden. The aim was to identify the main needs and challenges faced by researchers and R&I managers working in, or connected to, the digital health sector, particularly in relation to career development and success.
Why that matters is easy to overlook. The development and uptake of digital health solutions depends not only on technology, but also on people, skills and collaboration. It requires researchers who can work across disciplines, understand regulatory and ethical requirements and engage with non-academic actors. It also requires R&I managers able to connect universities, industry, innovation agencies and funders. Just as importantly, it depends on whether these career pathways are recognised, supported and stable enough for professionals to remain and grow within them.
More than 135 stakeholders, including researchers, R&I managers, healthcare providers, industry representatives and policy actors, took part in sessions hosted by BRITE-EU partners: Lund University (Sweden), the University of Porto with SHINE 2Europe (Portugal), Axencia Galega de Innovación with Cluster Saúde de Galicia and Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai with Asociația INIT (Romania), the University of Novi Sad (Serbia), and DEX Innovation Centre with Czech Technical University (Czechia).
Despite very different starting points, the sessions converged around several common messages.
- Training was a shared priority everywhere.
Participants asked for competences outside their scientific specialism: project management, fundraising, regulatory literacy, intellectual property, technology transfer and communication — delivered continuously and by role, not as one-off workshops.
- Collaboration across sectors remains limited.
Portugal concluded it is the single most important element missing from the ecosystem. Czech industry representatives described approaches to universities “falling on deaf ears”; technology transfer officers replied that companies contact rectors rather than the offices that actually broker collaboration.
- Regulation was named as a barrier across ecosystems.
Participants referred to data protection, AI governance, medical device requirements, ethics approvals, procurement. Sweden ranked regulatory and administrative complexity among both its top three needs and its top three barriers. The complaint was rarely about the rules themselves, but about the absence of anyone to help researchers navigate them: barriers that are, as the Swedish report put it, “not technological, but rather systemic”.
- Few collaborations outlast the projects that create them.
Every ecosystem raised the loss of networks, staff and momentum once funding stops, and asked for structures that outlive individual projects.
- Career systems do not yet reflect this work.
Academic evaluation favours publication over patenting, transfer and cross-sector collaboration; Swedish participants ranked reward systems a top-three barrier outright. Other participants called for hybrid, “bilingual” profiles able to move between research, management, healthcare and industry – built through mentoring, short secondments, micro-credentials and living labs.
The differences between national digital health ecosystems and its maturity level also matter.
Serbia set out to build national interoperability largely from scratch, while Spain – with Galicia cited as a European reference point – debated the subtler problem of data that is interoperable but still hard to use. Romania and Portugal put funding first; Czechia narrowed it to proof-of-concept gaps and missing reimbursement pathways. Portugal and Sweden both warned that digital health risks widening rather than narrowing health inequalities – one Portuguese table put it as building “digital health for the rich”. Sweden raised a concern absent elsewhere: the gap between promising results and routine care, and the case for treating implementation science as part of the innovation pathway rather than an afterthought.
One important caveat was that participation was stronger from academia across all ecosystems, while industry and healthcare actors were less represented. This limitation was also recognised in the discussions and will be considered in the interpretation of findings.
These insights will feed into BRITE-EU’s needs analysis and benchmarking activities, helping to shape the future project’s future training, mentoring, mobility and capacity-building activities.
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