End user-driven application of Generative Artificial Intelligence models in healthcare (GenAI4EU)

The Horizon Europe grant opportunity HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01 focuses on the end-user-driven application of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models in healthcare, referred to as GenAI4EU. It is part of the health cluster within Horizon Europe, categorized under Research and Innovation Actions (HORIZON-RIA). The call opened for submissions on May 22, 2025, and the deadline for applications is September 16, 2025, at 17:00 Brussels time.

The primary aim is to enhance healthcare delivery through the development and implementation of trustworthy, user-centric virtual assistant solutions powered by GenAI, focusing on personalized care and efficient healthcare processes. The expected outcomes include improved access to innovative healthcare for professionals and patients, enhanced outcomes, and greater public trust in AI tools. The grant emphasizes multidisciplinary collaboration and requires consortia that represent various stakeholders, including industry, academia, healthcare professionals, and patients.

Geographically, the opportunity is open to entities based in EU Member States and Associated Countries, with explicit eligibility for participants from the United States. The funding amount for this specific topic ranges from €15 million to €20 million, with a budget allocation of €40 million for HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01.

Applications will be a single-stage, requiring a full proposal submission. Each proposed project must demonstrate high maturity technology and include methodologies for continuing assessment of the developed solutions, addressing ethical considerations, transparency, and compliance with data protection regulations. Successful projects will likely leverage comprehensive multimodal health data and engage actively with healthcare professionals and stakeholders throughout the development process.

The call promotes the development of effective regulatory strategies and encourages the use of open-source methodologies when feasible. It is essential for proposals to demonstrate EU added value, ethical use of AI, and collaboration among various projects, aligning with the goals of enhancing efficiency, safety, and quality within healthcare systems.

Overall, this funding opportunity sets out to support innovative actions that advance the transformative role of AI in healthcare while ensuring ethical standards and stakeholder engagement are prioritized.

This is a Horizon Europe call, specifically HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01, focused on end-user-driven applications of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models in healthcare, also known as GenAI4EU. It falls under Cluster 1 Health of the Horizon Europe program and is a single-stage call. The action type is HORIZON-RIA, which stands for HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions, utilizing a HORIZON Action Grant Budget-Based [HORIZON-AG] model grant agreement. The call opened for submission on May 22, 2025, with a deadline of September 16, 2025, at 17:00:00 Brussels time.

The primary aim of this call is to support activities that contribute to the destination of ensuring equal access to innovative, sustainable, and high-quality healthcare. The expected outcomes of successful projects include:

1. Healthcare professionals having access to user-centric, robust, and trustworthy virtual assistant solutions based on Generative AI models and other AI tools for safer, more efficient, and personalized care.
2. Healthcare professionals benefiting from cross-country applicable methodologies that facilitate acceptability, healthcare uptake, and public trust in Generative AI-based virtual assistant tools.
3. Patients experiencing enhanced outcomes, more personalized care, and increased engagement with healthcare professionals, leading to improved safety, quality of care, access to appropriate healthcare information, and better patient-doctor communication.
4. Healthcare systems achieving improved cost-effective patient outcomes that surpass the standard of care in terms of accuracy, safety, and quality, along with cost savings through highly accurate, transparent, traceable, and explainable solutions.

The scope of the call addresses the challenges faced by healthcare professionals due to limited resources and the potential of Generative AI to provide solutions. It aims to advance research to improve Generative AI-based virtual assistant solutions in healthcare settings, focusing on patient health outcomes, personalized healthcare, and the resilience, sustainability, and efficiency of healthcare systems. The call also seeks to understand and mitigate potential shortcomings, such as biases, and develop frameworks for monitoring and overseeing the use of these solutions.

Key activities for research actions include:

1. Developing virtual assistant solutions based on new or optimized trustworthy and ethical Generative AI models, augmented by other AI tools. These models should leverage extensive and diverse multimodal health and research data, public knowledge, and reliable healthcare systems information, including electronic health records, medical imaging, genomics, proteomics, molecular data, laboratory results, and patient information. Development and training should occur in multinational consortia using federated governance approaches.
2. Demonstrating the added value and clinical utility of virtual assistant solutions in at least two healthcare use cases across different medical fields and unmet needs. Evidence of high maturity technology should be provided, assessing the solutions' effectiveness compared to the standard of care. Active engagement of healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers in the development and testing process is crucial.
3. Developing a regulatory strategy/interaction plan with regulators, including in the area of Health Technology Assessment, for generating evidence in a timely manner, considering the potential for future regulatory impact and sustainability.
4. Developing or adapting existing methodologies for continuous assessment of the developed solutions. These methodologies should demonstrate technical robustness, healthcare utility, and trustworthiness, adopting appropriate metrics for evaluating alignment with human values, ethical principles, performance, bias mitigation, explainability, and addressing Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications (ELSI), including data privacy and risk of discrimination.

Additional requirements and encouragements include:

*  Demonstrating EU added value by focusing on trustworthy Generative AI models developed in the EU and Associated countries, involving EU industrial developers and startups.
*  Encouraging an open-source approach when feasible.
*  Utilizing resources offered by AI factories.
*  Adhering to FAIR data principles and GDPR compliant processes.
*  Promoting transparency and openness of models.
*  Exploiting synergies with other relevant projects and leveraging available data infrastructures like the European Health Data Space and the European Open Science Cloud.
*  Training models with multimodal data in different EU languages.
*  Effective contribution of social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines.
*  Considering the involvement of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC).
*  Collaboration among selected projects.
*  Providing details of clinical studies in a dedicated annex.

The admissibility conditions, proposal page limits, eligible countries, financial and operational capacity, evaluation and award criteria, submission and evaluation processes, indicative timeline, and legal and financial setup are all described in the Horizon Europe Work Programme General Annexes and related guidance documents.

Applicants can find application and evaluation form templates, the HE Programme Guide, Model Grant Agreements, call-specific instructions, and additional documents on the Funding & Tenders Portal.

The budget overview for the HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01 call includes multiple topics, each with its own budget, opening date (May 22, 2025), deadline (September 16, 2025), contribution amounts, and indicative number of grants. The HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01 topic has a budget of EUR 40,000,000 and aims to award two grants with contributions ranging from EUR 15,000,000 to EUR 20,000,000.

The Funding & Tenders Portal provides resources for partner searches, electronic submission services, topic Q&As, and general support.

In summary, this Horizon Europe call seeks to fund research and innovation actions that develop and implement trustworthy Generative AI-based virtual assistants to improve healthcare delivery across Europe. It emphasizes ethical considerations, data privacy, collaboration, and the involvement of diverse stakeholders to ensure that the resulting solutions are effective, safe, and beneficial for healthcare professionals, patients, and healthcare systems.

This opportunity is about funding research and innovation in the area of healthcare using Generative AI. Imagine you have a team of smart people who want to build a super-helpful AI assistant for doctors and nurses. This AI could do things like quickly summarize patient records, suggest treatment options, or even predict potential health problems before they happen. The EU is offering money to teams that can create these AI assistants, but they want to make sure the AI is trustworthy, ethical, and respects patient privacy. The AI also needs to work well in different countries and languages. So, if you have a great idea for an AI assistant that can make healthcare better and more efficient, and you can put together a team that includes experts in AI, healthcare, and ethics, then this funding opportunity might be for you. The EU wants to see projects that not only develop the AI but also test it in real-world situations and make sure it's safe and reliable for everyone.

Eligible Applicant Types: The eligible applicant types for this opportunity include industry, academia, healthcare professionals, patients, and EU industrial developers, including leading-edge startups. The call specifically encourages the involvement of multidisciplinary consortia with a broad representation of stakeholders. Legal entities established in the United States of America are also eligible to receive Union funding. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) may participate as a member of the consortium.

Funding Type: The funding type for this opportunity is a grant, specifically a HORIZON Research and Innovation Action (HORIZON-RIA) and HORIZON Innovation Action (HORIZON-IA) and HORIZON Coordination and Support Actions (HORIZON-CSA) under the Horizon Europe program. The Model Grant Agreement is a HORIZON Action Grant Budget-Based [HORIZON-AG].

Consortium Requirement: The opportunity requires a consortium of multiple applicants, as it emphasizes multidisciplinary approaches and broad representation of stakeholders in the consortia. Multinational consortia are specifically mentioned for the development and training of AI models.

Beneficiary Scope (Geographic Eligibility): The geographic eligibility includes EU Member States and Associated Countries. A number of non-EU/non-Associated Countries that are not automatically eligible for funding have made specific provisions for making funding available for their participants in Horizon Europe projects. The United States of America is also explicitly mentioned as eligible for Union funding.

Target Sector: The primary target sector is health, with a focus on the application of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare settings. This includes personalized healthcare, virtual assistant solutions, medical fields, and related AI tools.

Mentioned Countries: United States of America, EU Member States, and Associated Countries.

Project Stage: The project stage is geared towards research, development, and demonstration, with an emphasis on demonstrating the added value and clinical utility of virtual assistant solutions. The call specifies that applicants should provide evidence of high maturity technology for the use cases.

Funding Amount: The funding amounts vary depending on the specific topic within the call, ranging from €2,000,000 to €20,000,000. For the specific topic HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01, the contributions range from €15,000,000 to €20,000,000.

Application Type: The application type is an open call with a single-stage submission process.

Nature of Support: Beneficiaries will receive money in the form of a grant to support their research and innovation activities.

Application Stages: The application process is a single-stage process.

Success Rates: The success rates are not explicitly mentioned, but the indicative number of grants is provided for each topic, which can be used to estimate the potential success rate based on the number of expected proposals. For HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01, the indicative number of grants is 2.

Co-funding Requirement: The information provided does not explicitly state a co-funding requirement.

Summary: This Horizon Europe call, specifically the HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01 topic, focuses on "End user-driven application of Generative Artificial Intelligence models in healthcare (GenAI4EU)". It aims to improve healthcare by supporting the development and implementation of trustworthy Generative AI-based virtual assistant solutions for healthcare professionals. The goal is to enhance efficiency, patient safety, personalized care, and the overall resilience of healthcare systems. Consortia applying for this call should be multidisciplinary, involving industry, academia, healthcare professionals, and patients, with a focus on EU added value through the use of AI models developed in the EU and Associated Countries. Projects should demonstrate the clinical utility of their solutions in multiple healthcare use cases, address ethical and regulatory considerations, and ensure data privacy and transparency. The funding is provided as a grant, with contributions ranging from €15,000,000 to €20,000,000 for the HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-CARE-01 topic, and the application process is a single-stage open call. The call encourages open-source approaches and collaboration among selected projects. The opening date is 22 May 2025 and the deadline is 16 September 2025.