Hanna Barzakouskaya is CEO and co-founder of Healsens – an innovative platform that helps individuals stay healthy as they age by identifying personal risks early and guiding them towards meaningful preventive actions.
Here, Barzakouskaya reveals her motivations for taking on preventative healthcare and outlines her ambitions for the platform over the next five years.
Hi Hanna. What started you on your mission to transform preventative healthcare?
I spent many years working in big tech, but my real interest in healthcare began when I saw firsthand how much preventable chronic disease affects people’s lives.
That experience showed me what the future may look like for millions of people: a future shaped not by age, but by a slow accumulation of health issues – many of which could have been prevented.
I realised that the biggest challenge is not treatment. It’s the lack of early detection and the absence of accessible tools that help people understand their risks in time.
Congratulations on winning the Next Generation Healthcare Award at Health Tech Forward 2025.
The judges said Healsens is “reshaping the future of healthcare”. What do you think they saw in your approach that set you apart from other preventive health solutions?
I believe the judges also saw the larger picture: Healsens is not just a consumer tool but an emerging prevention infrastructure that connects data, risk models and clinical guidance into one system.
Most preventive solutions stop at lifestyle tracking or surface-level wellness insights.
They might offer pre-set panels, “one-size-fits-all” recommendations, or wellness scores that feel intuitive – but they rarely translate into medical relevance.
We take the opposite approach.
We start with validated clinical risk models and combine them with our proprietary algorithms. The platform adapts automatically to each user. Younger people won’t see risk calculators that aren’t relevant for their age.
I think the judges saw that Healsens doesn’t simplify medicine – it makes medicine understandable.
And most importantly, every recommendation in Healsens is fully traceable: we can clearly show why a specific checkup is suggested, which clinical model or biomarker triggered it, and how that connects to real preventive guidelines.
That level of transparency is rare in consumer health and I believe the judges recognised how essential it is for the future of credible, data-driven prevention.
What might Healsens detect in someone’s lab data that a traditional screening would miss, and how early can you spot these warning signs?
Traditional screening programmes are essential, but they are typically episodic, guideline-based and focused on individual tests at specific moments in time.
Healsens builds on the same clinical foundations, but connects them into a continuous, personalised trajectory.
Conditions like diabetes or cardiovascular disease often develop silently over many years.
Long before symptoms appear, people may already show early metabolic shifts, inflammatory signals or changes in body composition that, taken together, indicate elevated risk.
We analyse patterns across multiple inputs and map them into personalised risk pathways.
In healthcare, this is known as risk stratification: identifying people who are moving toward disease long before they become patients.
Where traditional systems struggle is not in medical knowledge, but in continuity and integration.
Health data is fragmented across labs, clinics and time, making it difficult to see the full picture.
Healsens brings these signals together, allowing early trajectories to emerge that would otherwise remain unnoticed.
Many prevention platforms focus on lifestyle tracking or wellness metrics. How does Healsens differ in turning lab data into actionable medical insights?
Our core is continuous clinical risk modelling. Let me explain what this means in practice, both for lab data and for wellness signals.
People change as they age, and their screenings must evolve with them.
To support this, we built a modular clinical engine that takes health data as input and applies validated risk models and guidelines.
This allows us to implement, for example, lung cancer risk models for smokers, SCORE2 for cardiovascular risk in Europeans aged >40, or any other evidence-based pathway.
Because of this architecture, each user sees a personalised map of their risk zones directly connected to screening schedules, lifestyle recommendations and decision support for clinicians.
This layer of interpretation usually exists only inside clinical systems and is rarely visible to individuals. And it does not exist in wellness apps.
That said, wellness metrics have value when used correctly, not as scores but as contextual signals.
For example, our emotional tracking is not simple mood logging. It uses a two-dimensional arousal-energy model that helps us detect meaningful changes in mental resilience over time.
If someone consistently remains in a high-risk emotional zone for months, the system can suggest validated screening questionnaires or highlight patterns that may warrant attention from a clinician.
The same applies to alcohol intake, smoking behaviour, sleep regularity or chronic pain.
Used independently, these metrics are just wellness data. Used within a clinical risk framework, they become part of a meaningful preventive profile.
Our long-term vision is to make Healsens the intelligence layer that sits on top of European health data, continuously interpreting risk and guiding personalised prevention across the entire care ecosystem.
At what age should someone ideally start using Healsens, and what are the most critical early warning signs that healthcare systems currently miss?
Ideally, people should start using Healsens in their 20s.
Epidemiological data show that obesity, lipid disorders and hormonal dysregulation are now emerging at significantly younger ages than in previous generations.
Younger users also highlight an important gap: symptoms are often dismissed because of age, leaving people without guidance until problems escalate.
The largest group on our platform is 25-45. Proactive individuals who want structured, evidence-based prevention rather than supplements or guesswork.
That said, chronic disease prevention is relevant at every age.
What systemic failures in European healthcare is Healsens designed to address?
European healthcare suffers from three major gaps:
1. European healthcare systems were designed for episodic care, not continuous prevention at scale.
They excel at acute care and guideline-based screening, but longitudinal risk monitoring across populations remains outside their original scope
2. Data is fragmented. Labs, hospitals, insurers and patients operate in silos.
3. Risk is not monitored longitudinally or across domains.
Continuous risk interpretation is outside the scope of episodic, visit-based care models.
This means millions of at-risk individuals remain invisible to the system unless they explicitly ask for help.
When people say Healsens is “reshaping the future of healthcare,” this is what they mean: We help turn fragmented health data into earlier, actionable insights for prevention.
How does your model work with labs and hospitals and what have you learned about scaling?
We integrate directly with laboratory networks. Users can order tests, and results appear automatically in Healsens with structured interpretations.
This B2C model has been essential for validating the product, generating early revenue, and continuously improving our clinical engine.
For laboratories, Healsens increases repeat testing and supports the creation of structured preventive check-up programmes.
For hospitals, we provide an infrastructure layer that supports earlier risk stratification within existing clinical workflows.
Healsens is designed to integrate seamlessly into existing healthcare workflows and already offers its services across more than 2,000 locations in the Netherlands and Belgium.
At the same time, we see growing interest from insurers, corporate health programmes and clinical networks looking for tools to operationalise early risk reduction at scale.
Our architecture allows Healsens to evolve from a consumer-facing application into a B2B and B2B2C prevention gateway – a layer that supports laboratories, hospitals and insurers in delivering continuous, data-driven prevention across Europe.
This integration model is the foundation for a scalable health data gateway, enabling consistent access to health data across systems and supporting downstream prevention and decision-support layers.
France is next on your expansion roadmap for 2026. What’s different about the French healthcare landscape, and how are you adapting your model to fit?
France is next because it offers a clear, scalable entry point through large laboratory networks.
Preventive screening is widely accepted and embedded in routine healthcare, which makes laboratories a natural distribution channel for personalised prevention at scale.
We are adapting by integrating with major lab partners to achieve rapid geographic coverage and by aligning our screening logic and prevention pathways with French clinical guidelines and regulatory requirements.
At a product level, Healsens is designed as a data access layer that aggregates health data over time, with prevention intelligence built on top.
This architecture allows us to localise guidelines and workflows without rebuilding the core platform, making expansion into France both fast and structurally efficient.
How do you measure biological ageing versus chronological age, and how does this information change the way people engage with their health data?
Healsens incorporates longevity-related biomarkers as part of a broader clinical assessment framework, not as a standalone feature.
We analyse markers of inflammation, metabolic health, organ function, cardiovascular status and other systems to understand how a person’s physiology is changing over time.
These signals are used in two complementary ways:
1. To identify early shifts in chronic disease pathways.
Many long-term conditions begin with subtle changes in metabolic or inflammatory markers, long before symptoms appear. Incorporating these trends helps refine risk stratification and tailor prevention.
2. To estimate biological age as an aggregated resilience indicator.
We use a validated model originally trained on NHANES III data to assess how quickly someone is aging at a systems level.
Biological age here is not a cosmetic metric – it reflects multi-system resilience and correlates with risks of cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, frailty and mortality.
But the number itself is not the goal.
The value comes from understanding why someone’s trajectory looks the way it does: which biomarkers accelerate decline, which slow it, and how behaviour, screenings or medical follow-up can influence these mechanisms.
In Healsens, biological age sits alongside other clinical calculators as part of a unified interpretation layer.
This is how we support healthy ageing trajectories, turning fragmented data into a coherent picture of long-term risk and actionable next steps.
Looking five years ahead: If Healsens achieves its vision, what will be fundamentally different about how Europeans experience healthcare?
In five years, Healsens will operate as an intelligence layer within Europe’s emerging health data infrastructure, aligned with the vision of the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
It will provide scalable, continuous risk interpretation across care settings and geographies.
This shift will fundamentally change how Europeans experience healthcare.
Prevention will evolve from occasional check-ups to an ongoing, data-driven process. People will have timely access to their clinical data, understand their personalised risks earlier, and receive targeted screenings based on individual trajectories rather than population averages.
Laboratories will increasingly act as prevention hubs.
Insurers will have practical tools to operationalise early risk reduction.
Clinicians will be supported by dynamic risk insights that enable earlier intervention instead of crisis management.
A unified prevention infrastructure will also advance the science of risk prediction.
As richer, longitudinal, real-world data become available through EHDS frameworks, we will be able to refine existing models for European populations, improve calibration and identify additional biomarkers or behavioural patterns influencing long-term health.
This evolution will accelerate progress in longevity and geroscience, enabling large-scale analysis of aging trajectories and early pathophysiological changes.
And while we cannot eliminate chronic disease, far fewer people will reach midlife with unrecognised, silently progressing conditions because they will have seen their trajectory early and had the tools to act.
That is the future we are building: a Europe where prevention is continuous, personalised and deeply integrated into the health system.
Today, people see an app.
But in reality, Healsens is becoming a European Health Data Gateway: the interpretation layer that transforms fragmented clinical inputs into risk insights and preventive action.
The app is simply the first interface that shows how this infrastructure works in practice.
Find out more about Healsens at healsens.com
