From Clinical Experience to Practical Guidance: Building the TechConnect Toolkit

Some of the most important lessons in digital health don’t come from a boardroom. They come from witnessing if a technology actually fits or doesn’t fit into the rhythm of clinical work.  We joined our partners in TechConnect for a two-day meeting hosted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh).

We are responsible for turning what the initiative learns into practical tools and guidance that not only healthcare, but also other sectors can use. This means we need to compare the results across contexts and bring those insights back into the materials we build for the project.

The day started with a visit to a university hospital, beginning at AUTh’s School of Dentistry, where we observed the Greek clinical context first-hand. It was a chance to set what we witnessed against what we’d already learned from hospital visits in Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden, and to understand what’s consistent across countries versus what’s genuinely local.

The takeaway

Technology adoption in hospitals isn’t just about the tool. It’s about how professionals, organizational structures and daily routines interact around it. Many of the real obstacles only become visible once you’re standing in the ward, not reading about it afterwards.

That afternoon, we joined a workshop open to external stakeholders, presenting our progress and listening closely to perspectives from outside the project.

During day 2, we led the session on stakeholder engagement and the TechConnect Toolkit. Taking everything the consortium observes and learns and shaping it into guidance that healthcare organisations can genuinely put into practice, not theoretical best practice that sounds good in a deliverable but doesn’t survive contact with a real hospital.