The European Commission has earmarked €3 million to support the development and testing of AI scribes and other tools to improve health data quality and interoperability under the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
The funding is included in the Commission’s 2026 EU4Health work programme, adopted on 19 October, which allocates €46.15 million to digital health initiatives within an overall budget of €680.7 million.
Of the digital health allocation, €44.15 million is directed towards implementing the EHDS Regulation, with a further €2 million allocated to AI in healthcare.
The €3 million initiative aims to help hospitals, electronic health record (EHR) suppliers and health data organisations use AI to meet EHDS requirements for data quality, interoperability and access.
It includes support for ambient clinical intelligence applications, such as AI scribes, that generate structured clinical information directly within EHR systems.
The Commission wants to reduce administrative workloads for healthcare professionals while improving the quality of information available for patient care and secondary uses such as research.
The work programme identifies AI as a way to help healthcare organisations meet their obligations under the EHDS without creating further fragmentation between national health systems.
It also proposes support for EHR manufacturers to develop and validate AI tools that improve data quality at source, automate the creation of structured patient summaries and assist with preparing datasets for access requests.
Other proposed applications include automating dataset descriptions, metadata generation, data validation and the management of applications to access health data.
AI scribes and other ambient clinical intelligence tools will be piloted and validated in controlled clinical environments, with input from healthcare professionals and other users to ensure their outputs meet EHDS data quality and interoperability requirements.
The Commission is also seeking greater collaboration between EHR vendors, AI developers, healthcare providers, standardisation bodies and health data access bodies.
The €3 million call for proposals is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026 and will be managed by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA).
Eligible applicants include public health authorities, hospitals, healthcare providers, research organisations and academic institutions.
The wider EU4Health programme also provides funding for cross-border health data exchange and the infrastructure needed to implement the EHDS across member states.
The Commission said the programme would support the implementation of EU public health priorities, including the EHDS, the Safe Hearts Plan and the Critical Medicines Act.
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