---
title: 'How Copenhagen Uses AI and Digital Care to Support an Aging Population'
type: 'episode'
url: 'https://doc.social/episodes/how-copenhagen-uses-ai-and-digital-care-to-support-an-aging-population'
show: 'Faces of Digital Health'
show_url: 'https://doc.social/podcasts/faces-of-digital-health'
published: '2026-04-17'
audio: 'https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/DHT4138997627.mp3'
---

# 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

## Summary

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.