“The Nordic Welfare Model is not sustainable!”, they said, ”Too much focus on healthcare and too little on preventative care will break the system going forward. We need to get the citizens more involved, not only in the care process but also in preventative care. The question is just – how?”

This dialogue could have been a script from the NordicHealth2030-report published in 2019, stating one of the major challenges addressed in this report. How to make a shift from a traditional “sick care” focused approach to a more “preventative care” approach, and how to get the citizens involved and become “active” resources in the welfare model and not just “passive” recipients of care?

Increased use of Digital health apps could be - and can be - a large part of the answer to this problem but then we have to have a systematic approach for the evaluation, distribution and activation of safe health apps, - not only for a care process but also for preventative care.

Since 2019, the Nordic Interoperability Project/N!P has addressed this issue on a Nordic-wide level and initiated the “fast track” project to help harmonize a common way of evaluating, distributing and activating digital health apps in the region, now named NordDEC (www.norddec.org).