EU co-funded project UNITE announces first digital health winners

The Regional Innovation Valley project UNITE, coordinated by 28DIGITAL (Belgium) and co-funded under Horizon Europe, is dedicated to advancing digital health solutions that address the growing challenges posed by demographic transitions and aging populations. 

By promoting cross-regional collaboration and leveraging digital deep-tech innovation, UNITE aims to transform healthcare systems and develop new interregional value chains, ultimately enhancing Europe’s digital health market and global competitiveness.

The UNITE initiative has selected its first three joint interregional projects, marking a significant milestone in building a borderless European digital health ecosystem.

The first UNITE open call engaged over 1 000 organisations and received 19 proposals from across multiple European regions, bringing together startups, scaleups, universities, research centres, hospitals, and healthcare providers in interregional consortia.

After a multi-stage evaluation, only three projects made the cut-highlighting both the intense competition and the drive for solutions that can scale beyond local pilots.

The proposals clustered around two areas: sharing health data across borders and delivering more personalised remote care. Both are central to Europe’s strategy for modernising healthcare systems under growing pressure from ageing populations and workforce shortages.

Selected projects

The selected projects — CARDIO-HUB, NEODATA+, and RAD-TRACK EU — will enter the implementation phase in spring 2026. Each tackles a different aspect of the same challenge: making health data usable, interoperable, and clinically meaningful across fragmented systems.

CARDIO-HUB focuses on heart failure, combining real-world data and remote monitoring to enhance care for elderly patients. 

NEODATA+ targets neonatal intensive care, aiming to unlock highly sensitive datasets to enable earlier and more accurate clinical decisions. 

RAD-TRACK EU addresses the widespread issue of radiation exposure in medical imaging by implementing a system that enables patient data to follow individuals across providers. 

The total budget for the three projects amounts to €3 788 000, with a mix of regional funding and partner own co-funding contributions. The UNITE participating regions involved in the three projects include Central Macedonia, Northern Netherlands, Lombardy, Romania, and Extremadura. 

Collectively, these projects signal a shift from pilot experiments to full-scale deployment. While Europe has produced numerous digital health pilots, scaling them across borders has remained challenging due to strict regulatory frameworks and fragmented infrastructures.

Background information

Over four years, the €20 million pan-European UNITE initiative, launched under the European Commission's Regional Innovation Valleys initiative, and led by 28DIGITAL, aims to bridge Europe’s digital health divide by funding interregional innovation projects, supporting local startups and SMEs, and enabling the deployment of deep-tech solutions across healthcare systems.

A central focus of the project is making health data and digital health innovation scale across borders—by improving interoperability, aligning regional strategies, and streamlining procurement and adoption of solutions. Through open calls, training courses, and ecosystem-building activities, UNITE is designed to connect fragmented innovation landscapes and transform them into a coordinated European effort.

(Author: European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency)