“Cultural resistance is the biggest barrier to scaling healthcare innovation.”

Voices from the Data2Value Executive Dialogue: Erik Jylling, Executive Vice President, Region East Denmark.

Erik Jylling, Executive Vice President of Region East Denmark, is direct about where the barrier to healthcare innovation actually lies – not in funding or ideas, but in the cultural resistance that prevents proven solutions from travelling beyond the systems that created them.

Much of the policy conversation around healthcare innovation centres on investment. Jylling’s position is that this framing misses the point. “We have the basic funding, we have the ideas,” he said. What health systems lack is the readiness to share and adopt solutions across institutional and national boundaries and that gap is not one that additional resources alone can close.

“Scaling to the point where you share your solutions and overcome the cultural barrier is one of the greatest barriers.”

The pattern Jylling describes is familiar across European health systems: solutions are developed, piloted, and validated – then remain within the institutions that created them. The result is a landscape of local progress that does not reach the populations who could benefit from it most.

For Jylling, the measure of success in healthcare innovation cannot stop at the quality of the solution developed. It must extend to the scale at which it is adopted – and that requires confronting the cultural barriers that scaling consistently runs into.

Erik Jylling is Executive Vice President of Region East Denmark and a participant in the Data2Value Executive Dialogue, Copenhagen, May 18, 2026