What we learned at HLTH Europe 2026

We took SONARA to HLTH Europe 2026 at RAI Amsterdam, booth E130-3, from 15 to 18 June. Four days, two iPads, live demos all day. Here is what stayed with me.

The demo that works is the one that talks back

We ran the same scenario dozens of times: a crew member speaks a handover out loud, SONARA structures the record in real time, computes the scores, and produces the handover. No slides. The moment that changed conversations was always the same: someone from the audience grabbed the iPad, spoke a case from their own practice, in their own accent, and watched the record build itself. Offline. Airplane mode on, deliberately.

Health tech events are full of decks about ambient AI. Letting people break your product live is a different conversation. Nobody asked for the deck afterwards; they asked what a pilot looks like.

Three priorities, heard over and over

Talking to hospital executives and emergency leaders from across Europe, three themes came up in almost every serious conversation:

1. A clean digital front door. Emergency departments still receive paper, photographs of paper, or verbal-only handovers. The first ask is not fancy analytics; it is one structured record per arriving patient, reliably, every time.
2. Operational data as a by-product. Nobody wants another reporting tool that clinicians must feed. If every mission produces structured data on its own, arrival boards, forecasting and resource planning stop being a data-entry problem.
3. Interoperability inside the existing pathway. The sentence we heard most: "we cannot change our EHR." The answer that unlocked conversations: SONARA writes a standards-based record into the hospital system, FHIR R4, proven on the vendor's sandbox, and nothing changes on the hospital side.

None of these are about AI for its own sake. They are about the record: who creates it, how clean it is, and where it lands.

What a first step looks like

The most productive conversations ended with the same concrete proposal, and it fits in five lines: 45 to 60 minutes on site. A few emergency and ambulance clinicians, the people who give and receive handovers. Two iPads we bring, pre-configured to local protocols. Live cases, spoken by their crews, ending with the record written into a sandbox of their own EHR. Nothing touches their systems, so there is nothing to prepare.

That is the whole ask. If it lands, a small pilot follows, simulated first, then real.

Amsterdam, in one line

The market does not need convincing that emergency documentation is broken. It needs proof that fixing it does not require a two-year integration project. That proof fits on two iPads in a backpack.