Watch the full panel discussion → [Link to recording: “Creating Value in Changing Times” — HBI Global Conference 2026, Paris]
April 2026 | Paris, France
The Health and Beyond Innovation Global Conference is one of the most significant gatherings in the international healthcare calendar, a forum where heads of health systems, technology leaders, clinicians, and policymakers convene to confront the structural challenges facing healthcare worldwide and to chart a credible path forward. HBI 2026, held in Paris this April, brought that conversation into sharp focus under a defining theme: creating value in a healthcare landscape that is simultaneously advancing and failing the people it serves.
Helfie.AI CEO George Tomeski was invited to participate in the flagship panel discussion, “Creating Value in Changing Times”, alongside Pascale Roche, Dimitris Moulavasilis, and Julia Andes, with the discussion moderated by Lee Murray. The panel convened leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem, each bringing a distinct perspective on where genuine value creation in healthcare begins. Published below are George’s remarks, a contribution that offered a counter-argument to the prevailing model and a demonstration that a fundamentally different architecture for healthcare now exists. Helfie.AI.
George’s position was unambiguous: the structural failures of modern healthcare are not the result of insufficient investment, insufficient research, or insufficient will. They are the result of a system designed to respond to illness rather than prevent it, one that engages with the human being only at the point of breakdown, and one whose economic foundations reward decline rather than health. Seven in ten deaths globally each year are from conditions medicine knows how to detect and treat. That statistic has not changed in thirty years. $140 trillion has been invested in health systems across developed nations in the last two decades, and access today is worse than it was when that investment began.
“The defining structural flaw is that engagement begins when we break down. Everything we talk about is about a patient, not about a person. Everything we talk about is what happens when things don’t go right. And unfortunately, that is too late.”
What Helfie.AI has built is the infrastructure to invert this. An AI paired with every individual, capable of detecting thirty health conditions today through a smartphone alone, blood markers, cardiovascular indicators, respiratory conditions, skin cancers, endometriosis, bowel cancers, with coverage expanding to ninety percent of human health conditions within twelve to eighteen months. Proactive, personalised, and accessible at a cost of cents rather than hundreds of dollars. Not a product for the institutional healthcare system, but infrastructure designed to exist alongside the human being, before the system is ever required.
“We are looking to build health, not healthcare, but health, into the fabric of everyday life of every human.”
Helfie.AI’s presence at HBI 2026 was a statement of intent. The conversation in Paris reflected a growing global consensus that isolated innovation within existing systems is no longer sufficient. What is required is a reimagining of where and how healthcare begins, and the courage to build the infrastructure that makes it possible.
George’s full remarks from HBI Paris 2026 are published below.
Speaker: George Tomeski, CEO, Helfie.AI
Introduction
I’m George Tomeski from Helfie.AI, we’ve missed the ‘e’ from Helfie on the board. Actually, getting here from my taxi from the hotel was harder than Melbourne to Paris.
I have been fortunate enough to work across multiple sectors as a founder and co-founder of many businesses, and a couple of years ago I put my thinking towards systems that govern the way we as humans exist, and asked the question: how can we re-engineer these things so that human outcomes are central to some of these models? And it’s no more profound than it is in healthcare, and I’m looking forward to sharing my perspectives on how we are tackling that with the business I’m involved in at the moment.
I’d like to present a little bit of a counter-architecture to some of the conversation that we have been having in the last half an hour. We’re building genuine intelligence around healthcare, an infrastructure around healthcare that delivers the earliest possible detection of a condition in a human. Our capability to exist at the earliest computational boundary of human risk, an infrastructure that will proactively prevent before you make your way to a system that requires you to fix anything, and an infrastructure that algorithmically and autonomously will optimise wellbeing for every human.
Before I get into demonstrating what that looks like as a lived reality, I just want to focus a little bit on how we see the problem in healthcare, because that is important in terms of the solution we are building. Some of this you will know, but I just want to highlight it because it is the underpinning of the platform that we have built around health.
The Problem: Healthcare’s Structural Flaws
The Participation Problem
The first thing is healthcare has got a participation problem, and it kind of doesn’t matter what country you are in or what city in the world, this is a persistent structural flaw in our current healthcare model. Not enough humans participate in healthcare, particularly preventative health, and the personal and economic trauma of this is staggering. This statistic has not changed for the last 20 or 30 years: seven out of ten of us will succumb to a condition that we know how to detect and that we know how to treat successfully. Yet 70% of people who die in the world every year die from something that we know how to fix, and I’m not counting pain and suffering here, I’m just talking about succumbing. The economic impact is horrendous. I don’t even know how governments afford stinging taxpayers what they do for healthcare. Most of the $17 trillion dollars that goes towards health is to treat things we could have stopped. So we have this perversity in healthcare where we have avoidable death and avoidable cost.
The Data Problem
The other important thing here is that data is not active in healthcare. Despite all of the incredible progress we have made in making data operable inside health, the fact is data remains gate-kept, it is in the custody of those who generate the data, and is not necessarily put to use towards our health the way it could, should, and needs to be.
The third largest killer of humans in the world is still misdiagnosis by a doctor, and this is not because doctors are not skilled or because their education systems are lacking. This is simply because, recognising, to Julia’s point, the staggering capacity deficiency we have in healthcare, they are not equipped with the information they need when they are dealing with the patient. This is a solvable problem. 25% of the data that is generated in the world today is human health data. It is the fastest growing category, above and beyond all other content in the world, and we can’t harness it in the way that we need to.
Declining Outcomes Despite Increased Spending
More systemically, and I provide numbers here from before COVID so I don’t want anything to be misguided by that, in countries that spend a large chunk of their GDP on healthcare, outcomes are declining. In the UK, £250 billion gives our country medieval queues to see a doctor. In the US, we have created a new class of medical poverty, people who can’t put food on their table because of medical bills. So we have declining life expectancy in the places where we spend the most on healthcare.
The Timing Problem
The other piece we are addressing that’s important is the timing problem. It’s been mentioned by everybody on this panel, we just engage late. The statistics are there and you know them all. Most conditions, if detected early, can be resolved successfully. We have not been able to invert this for 30, 40, or 50 years. In fact, we have made no impact on the things that kill us today, despite all the amazing things we hear at conferences like this.
Data remains a lagging indicator. Our bodies send signals to us really, really early in terms of what is going on, we just can’t read them. We don’t exist as a healthcare system next to the human; we exist in silos, away from them.
So, what would happen if all of us could all of a sudden participate actively in health, in preventative health, and what if all of our data could be put to use in our health? I think you would have a 1970s moment, when we introduced seat belts and deaths from car accidents just fell through the floor. That’s bad news if you’re in the funeral industry, a systemic shock, but in terms of outcomes to humans it was profound. We would live longer, every treatment we have could be put to effective use, the systems that we have today would be cheaper to run, but more importantly they would be more intelligent. You would have population-wide intelligence on what is happening dynamically in populations, which would inform systems. And then there’s a bunch of published research everywhere on what human progress would look like if we could do things like this.
The Defining Structural Flaw
The defining structural flaw of the system that we are looking to address is that engagement begins when we break down. Everything we talk about is about a patient, not about a person. Everything we talk about is what happens when things don’t go right, and unfortunately that is too late in terms of tackling some of the things I have touched on.
Modern healthcare can’t fix this. In the last 20 years, $140 trillion dollars of money has been invested in health systems by our developed countries, and access is worse today than it was then. People either can’t afford to see a doctor or they avoid seeing one. And still, despite all of this, for 4 billion people on the earth today, there is no doctor to see, there is no healthcare system to avoid or not go to. And even if the system wanted to address this, it just couldn’t. There is simply not enough capacity to go anywhere near addressing the participation problem or the timing problem for healthcare, and we couldn’t afford it.
The system has a cost scale that is beyond universal access, but probably more fundamentally the economic incentives just don’t exist. We can’t price health, we can price decline, we can price sickness at $17 trillion a year. We have no mechanism, we have no modern infrastructure to say: here is what health is worth to modern economies and societies. And in fact, one thing that has always sat uncomfortably with me about healthcare is that the better it does, the worse we do, and that is the economic foundation of modern healthcare, and that needs to be inverted.
On the other side, our chairman is the inventor of mRNA, he has patents that have saved countless people around the world, and we have this argument all the time. We have rolled out our medical innovations in the last 20 years like Marvel sequels, it’s amazing. Sometimes I get on stages like this with peers and I’m just blown away by the things we can do. But Julia’s slide said it better than mine: the reality is it’s done nothing to change the resilience of our species. We die at an increasing rate from the same things that killed us 20 or 30 years ago. So despite this innovation, despite the fact that I could change my unborn child’s eye colour if I wanted to (if it were legal), we still die from things we really shouldn’t die from.
I’ve been pointed to the UK here because this is their chart, but it’s the same dynamic everywhere around the world: the red is how much our governments spend of our money on healthcare, the green is what has happened to life expectancy, and we know we lived longer when we smoked indoors. I know we still do here in France sometimes, and certainly in places I’ve been. And when we drove without seat belts. Our health systems are hostage to something that is dangerous: our outcomes degrade or go nowhere, and costs escalate.
The Counter-Architecture: What Helfie.AI Has Built
So, the counter-architecture we need is to move from a system that fixes us to a system that can live next to us, a system that can compute our risk. And that’s what we have built.
We are a company that pairs every single human with their own intelligence, an algorithm, an AI that’s capable of checking health conditions just through a mobile phone. Thirty conditions right now, covering 90% of human health conditions over the next 12–18 months, completely personalised to you and your lived reality. And one that optimises health: you use us once, and that’s it, you don’t need to keep coming back. It works in a way that understands you and optimises what you need to do.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We can check just through a selfie 30 different markers. You hold your phone up to your face, you pay around 20 cents, and we can check all of your key indicators, all of your blood markers and a series of other items. Tests that might cost hundreds of dollars to do, that you do once every couple of years if ever, are now done through your phone.
Blood pressure, heart health, cough into your phone and we can check for all respiratory conditions: COVID, tuberculosis, COPD, ILD, in a 30-second cough, again for a couple of cents. Hover your phone over your skin and we can check for skin conditions, including cancers. Take a photo of something you leave in the toilet and we can check for bowel cancers. Endometriosis is a condition that takes 10 years for the current system to detect, we can do it in less than a minute. And if you are incurably romantic, we can check your sexual health and indicate STIs if you need, and so forth.
These are real today in our platform, and as we go forward we will cover 90% of human health conditions just by pointing your phone at a problem and understanding what it is you might be dealing with.
Beyond this, in terms of personalisation, the minute you use us once, the algorithm goes to work. It knows that you’re 23 years old and healthy, and it doesn’t check in every day. It knows you’re 65 and managing a chronic condition, and it comes back to you and says: ‘Hey, I need you to check this, I need you to do this.’ And it speaks to you accordingly.
A Vision for Human-Centred Health Infrastructure
This is human scale. This is a view that says we as humans will have symbiotic relationships with AI. They need to be trusted, they need to be important, and they need to work for us. They need to be oriented to outcomes for us, not to profit protocols elsewhere, but to human outcomes. And it needs to be accessible for the first time by all, not as words in a UN document that says health is a human right, but as a lived truth for every single human.
So, changing value in changing times for us is less about re-plumbing what we have and more about creating an infrastructure that upgrades civilisation. And one, back to my opening remarks about my involvement in this endeavour, that’s about building systems and infrastructures for a new world that benefit humans and humanity first. And that’s what we are doing. We are looking to build health, not healthcare, but health, into the fabric of everyday life of every human.
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