The EU begins recruiting hospitals for AI-powered screening centers

The European Commission is inviting hospitals and clinics across the European Union to join a new network of AI-Powered Advanced Screening Centres, a flagship initiative focused initially on the early detection and diagnosis of cancer and cardiovascular disease. The call for expressions of interest, which closes 10 April, 2026, marks the Commission’s largest coordinated effort to date to move AI-assisted diagnostics from pilots into structured clinical deployment across all 27 EU member states.

The EU’s Joint Research Centre estimated 2.7 million new cancer cases across member states in 2024. Cancer accounts for roughly one quarter of all deaths in the bloc and is projected to become Europe’s leading cause of mortality. Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death and disability, with outcomes varying sharply by geography, gender, and socioeconomic status. Screening rates and mortality gaps between Eastern and Western Europe continue to appear across Commission health reports.

From policy blueprint to federated clinical network

The network is a centerpiece of the Apply AI Strategy, which the Commission published in October 2025 with the goal of accelerating AI adoption across strategic industrial sectors. Healthcare is identified as one of the strategy’s priority sectors. The strategy introduces “sectoral flagships” targeting healthcare, robotics, manufacturing, and defense, with AI-powered screening centres among the most concrete of its early commitments. Funding mobilized under the strategy reaches approximately €1 billion, though the screening network will draw on multiple EU programs rather than a single dedicated budget line.

The Commission is building a federated learning system, one that uses real hospitals as its experimental nodes. Enrolled centers will participate in collaborative multi-center studies that:

• Evaluate the real-world performance of AI solutions
• Pilot approved AI tools in clinical environments
• Conduct usability and workflow assessments
• Contribute to shared frameworks for model validation

Centres not yet technically ready may join as observers, with a commitment to reaching minimum readiness by 2028. The network aims to cover all EU member states by the end of 2029.

The infrastructure undergirding the initiative reflects years of painstaking EU data policy work. The European Health Data Space, which entered into force in 2025, is designed to enable secure and interoperable access to health data for AI training, testing, and evaluation. The Commission sees this foundation as critical for developing robust and trustworthy models at continental scale.

In the cancer domain, the Cancer Image Europe platform will serve as the primary repository for multi-centre imaging studies. For cardiovascular health, the network will build on the EU4Health Cardiovascular Flagship, which provides the underlying digital infrastructure for cross-border data sharing and coordination.

Bridging evidence generation and AI adoption

The network arrives alongside a parallel initiative, COMPASS-AI, launched in October 2025. COMASS-AI establishes a community of experts tasked with developing AI deployment guidelines and raising AI literacy among healthcare professionals and hospital managers. The two efforts are designed to work in tandem: the screening network generates clinical evidence and COMPASS-AI turns that evidence into actionable guidance for systems that haven’t yet adopted the tools.

That divide matters: AI in clinical diagnostics, despite years of promising research, has struggled to move beyond well-resourced academic centers. The Commission acknowledged that only 13.5% of EU businesses are currently using AI technologies, a figure that underscores the gap between policy ambition and on-the-ground adoption.

The regulatory environment is shifting in parallel. The EU AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, takes a risk-based approach and classifies many clinical decision-support tools as high-risk systems subject to stricter conformity requirements. Full applicability arrives in August 2027, a deadline that will coincide, by design, with the period when the screening network is expected to have matured from early pilots into operational reference sites.

​​Investment questions and the implementation test

Legal analysts at Bird & Bird have argued that the Apply AI Strategy emphasizes governance structures and expertise centres more than defined investment targets. While the Commission has committed to benchmarking public and private AI spending and setting targets based on monitoring data, the methodology for that benchmarking is still under development.

To encourage participation, the Commission is offering enrolled hospitals early access to research outputs, technical training in AI validation and ethics, and formal designation as EU reference sites. Whether those incentives are sufficient will depend on how national procurement rules, reimbursement structures, and workforce constraints interact with the network’s clinical evidence.

The 10 April deadline gives eligible organizations roughly two months to register interest. The next phase will determine how quickly participating centres move from collaborative studies into routine diagnostic workflows within Europe’s fragmented health systems.