How Copenhagen Uses AI and Digital Care to Support an Aging Population

This episode explores how Denmark’s 2024 health reform is accelerating an already mature digital health ecosystem, with a special focus on Copenhagen’s municipality-led elderly and community care services.

Speakers Anders Elken Sønderby and Rikke Saltoft Andersen from City of Copenhagen, explain how the reform responds to demographic pressures: a growing elderly population, increasing chronic disease burden, and workforce shortages. Rather than representing a radical shift, the reform acts as an acceleration layer on top of long-established digital health infrastructure.

The discussion dives into how municipalities support home care, nursing, rehabilitation, prevention, and care homes, all digitally connected with hospitals and general practitioners through Denmark’s long-standing MedCom interoperability framework. A strong emphasis is placed on care continuity, ensuring data follows citizens across hospitals, care homes, and home-based services.

A standout theme is Copenhagen’s effort to include relatives and informal caregivers in care planning through digital dialogue tools and telemedicine, improving health equity and patient support.

The conversation concludes with the city’s AI ambitions, particularly a proof-of-conceptwhich uses speech-to-text, summarization, and structured categorization to reduce documentation burden for care workers and improve data quality across 10,000 staff members.