At the Radical Health Festival in Helsinki this January, Invest4Health joined policymakers, innovators, civil society leaders and financing actors to advance a shared agenda: rethinking how we finance precision health. Central to this discussion was a deeper challenge: redefining how Europe understands, governs, and funds health itself.
If health is genuinely co-produced across sectors and local communities, then the implication is unavoidable: the “health system” can no longer be defined by institutions or budgets alone, but by function. In this framing, the health system becomes the set of actors, assets, and incentives that materially shape population health trajectories over time, regardless of sector or budget line. Healthcare is therefore only one of several delivery platforms, and it can operate more effectively when embedded within a coordinated, cross-sector investment ecosystem.
Once this definition is adopted, several consequences follow. Accountability shifts. Financing logic must change. Performance measurement also changes. Redefining the health system is not a semantic exercise; it is a prerequisite for fiscal realism.
The difficulty is that prevention lacks a compelling narrative of success. Avoided hospitalisations, prevented deterioration, and reduced future demand are real achievements, yet they remain largely invisible in political and budgetary terms. Learning is too often treated as failure. Long-term payment and financing models do not fail because they are flawed in principle; they fail because short-term political cycles withdraw patience, protection, and risk coverage before these models are given time to work.
Smart capacitating investment is an attempt to correct this mismatch. It does so by creating a transitional financial architecture that prioritises what might be called soft resilience infrastructure: accepting early and visible costs to expand long-term ecosystem capacity, stability, and public value.
As Jo argued during the panel, the core question is not whether precision health works. The question is whether we are willing to finance it through an investment logic that matches how its value actually unfolds: over time, across sectors, and between institutions.
Building on these discussions, Rypple (who organised and convened the fishbowl and panel sessions) are now leading the development of a White Paper, From Belief to Budget: Why Prevention Fails — and What It Would Take to Make It Stick, with panel members (including Invest4Health) and participants.
Written by Joanna Lane
