Presentation of the Sixth Edition of Welfair at MIMIT
Presentation of the Sixth Edition of Welfair at MIMIT
On Wednesday, May 28, the official presentation of the new edition of WELFAIR, the fair dedicated to healthcare, took place in the Sala del Parlamentino at the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT). The theme of this year’s edition was: “The Balance of Healthcare. Innovation: from producers of expenditure to tools for sustainability.” The 2025 edition, which is internationally certified, will be held at the Fiera di Roma from November 4 to 7, 2025.
The meeting was opened by Roberto Luongo, Advisor for Internationalization and Made in Italy at MIMIT, Roberta Angelilli, Vice President of the Lazio Region and Assessor for Economic Development, Trade, Craftsmanship, Industry, Internationalization, and Pietro Piccinetti, President of the Internationalization Commission at AEFI – Italian Exhibition and Fair Association.
Roberta Angelilli then spoke, emphasizing how Lazio is one of the leading regions for Made in Italy in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors, with over €12 billion in exports and 22,000 employees. The Welfair fair, of which the Region is a partner, fully aligns with the strategy of supporting major events and internationalization. It is a very important event for Lazio because it focuses on healthcare not only as a provider of services but also as a research engine and a catalyst for the clusters of excellence in our productive system.
WELFAIR is the reference point for the entire ecosystem of Italian healthcare: an event that brings together the top healthcare governance leaders, scientific societies, and major companies in the medical technology sector. It provides a unique opportunity for dialogue and collaboration among all stakeholders, with the goal of contributing to the creation of a stronger, safer, and more integrated National Health Service.
The sixth edition was presented by Welfair’s scientific coordinators, Enzo Chilelli and Giovanni Scapagnini, along with Marinella D’Innocenzo, a member of the fair’s Scientific Committee.
The main mission of Welfair 2025 will be to serve as a fair for connections capable of creating a system for the future of healthcare, with Governance as the key point of connection. Additionally, connections will be made between the National Health Service, the Biomedical sector, and Digital Health, as well as between Prevention, healthy aging, and sustainability.
“We are used to seeing the National Health Service as a buyer and the eHealth and biomedical industries as mere suppliers. However, the challenge we present today in launching the new edition of Welfair 2025 is to look at them together, creating a connection as a single sector that strengthens the country system in some key areas: exports, the effectiveness of healthcare investment, and the added value for patients and therapists,” says Enzo Chilelli. “Biomedical and Digital Health are already high-innovation sectors where both design and production require high standards of competence, precision, and quality. In short, they represent an excellence of Made in Italy as well as a model sector for Industry 5.0. The medical devices sector in Italy generates a market worth €18.3 billion between exports and the domestic market and counts 4,641 companies employing 117,607 people. Furthermore, Digital Health has many national champions and attracts multinational companies, including innovative startups, laboratories, and research centers throughout Italy, working in the fields of big data and artificial intelligence applied to health and digital health. This sector is worth about €4 billion in Italy, €50 billion in Europe, and over €1,000 billion worldwide.”
Other crucial connections that the Welfair days will aim to establish during the 2025 edition include the Hospitals of the Future, AI, and Digital Health applied to territories, telemedicine, governance, and the reorganization of hospital and territorial care, with particular attention to how general management will guide organizational innovation.
“In recent years, Italy has lost almost two years of life expectancy, and since 2013, the curve has started to decline. But the most critical data concerns healthy life expectancy: today we live up to 80 years, but only just under 60 of those years are in good health. This means living with chronic conditions for about 20 years, with significant impacts on public spending. By 2050, one in three elderly people could be affected by neurodegenerative diseases. The good news is that we can intervene: correct lifestyles reduce the risk of dementia by over 45%. This is why in the next edition of Welfair, we will focus on primary prevention, nutrition, and health promotion as strategic levers for sustainability,” concludes Giovanni Scapagnini.
“One of the major themes to be addressed in the sixth edition of Welfair is governance and sustainability,” emphasizes Marinella D’Innocenzo. “The focus of the discussions will be on territorial care, telemedicine, and, above all, technological and digital innovation, which will be the overarching theme of this edition. We will discuss with the General Management of healthcare companies not only about technologies but also about organizational transformation: because innovation is, first and foremost, the ability to rethink processes and lead change. The working groups will focus on a new corporate leadership capable of integrating the managerial dimension with data-driven governance. Only in this way will it be possible to monitor, evaluate, and guide the advancement of digitalization within the healthcare system in a sustainable manner.”
In summary, the main topics of the 2025 edition of the Welfair fair will include:
The role of the General Manager in the digitalization of territorial healthcare;
The impact of lifestyle on epigenetics and healthy aging;
Uniformity in risk management in the National Health Service (SSN) and its value for financial sustainability;
The evolution of artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and the Italian medical technology industry;
Overcoming stigma towards patients and strengthening health education among professionals;
Dialogue and collaboration between healthcare companies and health providers (Hospitals/Nursing Homes/Pharmacies) to build innovation paths together;
Synergy between scientific societies and patient associations;
Integration between SSN, the Third Sector, and private actors.
And many other highly relevant topics with a direct impact on governance, quality, safety, inclusivity, and sustainability in social healthcare and technological innovation.
Public and private decision-makers, professionals, and institutional representatives will engage in discussions on these crucial challenges, sharing expertise, experiences, and concrete solutions for an increasingly innovative and effective healthcare service. Alongside them, scientific societies, professional categories, and companies will contribute with specialized insights, roundtable discussions, and meetings scheduled during the four days of the event.
In this context, during the presentation at MIMIT, Sandro Michelini, President of the Lipedema World Alliance and a leading angiologist for the global study of lipedema, announced that from November 5 to 8, 2025, Fiera Roma will host, concurrently with Welfair, the Lipedema World Congress. This international congress is dedicated to lipedema, a chronic and still poorly understood condition that predominantly affects women (up to 18% of the global female population), causing painful accumulations of fat tissue in the legs, buttocks, and arms.
The congress will bring together the world’s leading experts for an unprecedented multidisciplinary exchange. Speakers and delegates from over 30 countries are expected, with the goal of networking, sharing knowledge, and advancing the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of the condition.
The debate was also attended by Giovanni Spera, Endocrinologist, former President of Sisdca, the Italian Society for the Study of Eating Disorders, from 2000 to 2010, Professor of Internal Medicine at the Department of Experimental Medicine at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” General Lieutenant Carlo Catalano, Inspector General of Military Healthcare – Ministry of Defense, and Tiziano Melchiorre, Secretary General of IAPB Italia ETS.
Finally, Immacolata De Vivo, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Head of the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, one of the world’s leading experts in molecular epidemiology and cancer genetics, as well as Eugenio Luigi Iorio, professor of aging biology at UNIUBE University in Uberlândia, Brazil, and scientific director of the REDOX CENTER in Tokyo, announced their participation in Welfair 2025.
