In recent months, the European Union has delivered two significant signals reshaping the environment for advanced personalised healthcare projects such as POINT. The European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation has been adopted by the Council, strengthening cross-border access and safe reuse of health data for research and innovation. Concurrently, the European Commission has launched a flagship initiative to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence in healthcare, with a focus on responsible deployment, sharing of best practices and operational support for clinical use.
What the EHDS brings
The EHDS Regulation, adopted on 21 January 2025, establishes a legal and technical framework for a dedicated EU health data space. Its key goals are empowering citizens’ access to their health data, ensuring cross-border interoperability of digital health services and enabling controlled reuse of health datasets for research and innovation. This framework makes large-scale aggregation and analysis of clinical, biological and outcome data more feasible—an essential step in validating biomarkers and predictive models.
The Commission’s AI in healthcare initiative
Parallel to the EHDS, the Commission launched in October 2025 a strategic initiative to stimulate AI adoption in the health sector. It includes a dedicated platform for best-practice exchange, guidelines for clinical deployment of AI systems, efforts to raise digital literacy in healthcare and support measures for pilot projects in priority areas (including oncology and remote services). The aim is to enable rapid yet reliable adoption of AI solutions that can improve diagnosis, personalised prevention and clinical decision-making.
What this means for POINT
POINT is a European-funded project that aims to enhance personalised care for people with long-term outcomes from COVID-19 by developing mechanistic biomarkers and a “virtual twin” model for clinical decision support. These two EU institutional developments provide an enabling environment at several levels:
- The data access & interoperability (EHDS) can facilitate access to electronic health records and standardised datasets necessary to validate biomarkers and generalise the virtual twin model.
- The guidelines of AI governance & deployment, best-practice platform and pilot-support measures of the Commission can facilitate the translational pathway of AI models into clinical practice– exactly the roadmap envisioned by POINT.
In short, the EHDS lowers the barriers to access and share the data needed for translational research; the Commission’s AI healthcare strategy provides tools and pathways to bring algorithms and virtual twins from development into everyday clinical use- precisely the value proposition of POINT.
