The annual global health summit in Berlin, convening health ministers, academic leaders, WHO and international officials and private-sector executives across three days to turn scientific evidence and policy dialogue into commitments for more resilient and equitable health systems.
The World Health Summit is an annual strategic forum for global health, held in Berlin since 2009. It was initiated by Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin and is run by the WHS Foundation GmbH, co-governed by the WHS Academic Alliance, a network of around 30 leading academic health institutions worldwide. The 2026 edition carries the leitmotif "From Crisis to Resilience: Innovating for Health" and organises its programme around six central topics spanning health-system strengthening, equity, pandemic preparedness, financing and the role of artificial intelligence in health.
The summit exists to set a shared agenda across the people who govern, fund and study health systems. Its distinguishing feature is the routine presence of sitting health ministers alongside the scientific leadership of its academic alliance, which gives the discussions both political weight and research grounding. For a digital health or clinical AI audience, the summit is the place where deployment questions meet the governance, financing and equity constraints that decide whether a technology reaches patients, rather than a venue for product evaluation.
The 2026 programme is built around six central topics. Based on the published leitmotif and the recurring structure of recent editions, the coverage includes:
Confirmed and recurring participants span government, multilateral and academic leadership:
Only in part. Digital health and AI form one of the six central topics, not the core identity. The programme's centre of gravity is global health governance, financing, equity and pandemic preparedness. It is the right event for situating digital health within health-system policy, and the wrong one for hands-on technology evaluation.
The World Health Summit is co-governed by academic health institutions and rooted in a public university, with sitting health ministers as routine participants. HLTH Europe is a commercial innovation forum for executives and investors, and HIMSS is health-IT and informatics-driven. The summit is the only one of the three built around global health policy and explicit representation from low- and middle-income countries.
The World Health Summit is organised by WHS Foundation GmbH, rooted in Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, which initiated the first summit in 2009. It is co-governed by the WHS Academic Alliance, a network of around 30 leading academic health institutions worldwide. This academic backbone, combined with governmental participation, is what gives the summit its standing as a global health policy convening rather than a commercial conference.
The World Health Summit is the global health policy event of the EMEA autumn, convening ministers, WHO and academic leaders in Berlin; digital health and clinical AI sit as one strand of six within a programme whose centre of gravity is health-system resilience and equity.
Registration is open through the official conference portal. Pricing is tiered by geography and organisation type, with an early-bird rate until 31 July, a 50 percent discount for participants resident in low- and middle-income countries, and a limited number of complimentary places for youth-led and civil-society organisations. Exact amounts are not publicly disclosed on the official pages as of verification.
At the InterContinental Berlin, Budapester Straße 2, 10787 Berlin, with a parallel online programme.
Yes. The summit runs a substantial digital programme; organiser figures cite more than 40,000 online participants alongside roughly 4,000 on-site.
Yes. Participants with habitual residence in low- and middle-income countries receive a 50 percent discount, and fellowship-funded places support broader participation.
| Official website | https://www.worldhealthsummit.org/ |
| Register | https://www.conference.worldhealthsummit.org/ |
| Organiser | https://www.worldhealthsummit.org/about |