UNITE has named the first three digital health projects selected to support cross-border deployment in Europe.
The Regional Innovation Valley project UNITE, coordinated by 28DIGITAL in Belgium and co-funded under Horizon Europe, has selected CARDIO-HUB, NEODATA+ and RAD-TRACK EU as its first joint interregional projects.
The initiative said the projects mark a milestone in building a borderless European digital health ecosystem.
The first UNITE open call involved more than 1,000 organisations and attracted 19 proposals from several European regions.
Startups, scaleups, universities, research centres, hospitals and healthcare providers took part in interregional consortia.
Following a multi-stage evaluation process, three projects were selected.
The proposals centred on two areas: sharing health data across borders and delivering more personalised remote care.
Both are central to Europe’s strategy to modernise healthcare systems under growing pressure from ageing populations and workforce shortages.
The selected projects will enter the implementation phase in spring 2026.
CARDIO-HUB will focus on heart failure, combining real-world data with remote monitoring to improve care for older patients.
NEODATA+ will focus on neonatal intensive care, aiming to unlock highly sensitive datasets to support earlier and more accurate clinical decisions.
RAD-TRACK EU will address radiation exposure in medical imaging by implementing a system that allows patient data to follow individuals across providers.
The three projects have a combined budget of €3.788m, made up of regional funding and partner co-funding contributions.
The UNITE participating regions involved in the projects include Central Macedonia, Northern Netherlands, Lombardy, Romania and Extremadura.
Collectively, the projects signal a shift from pilot experiments to fuller-scale deployment.
While Europe has produced many digital health pilots, scaling them across borders has remained challenging because of strict regulatory frameworks and fragmented infrastructure.
Over four years, the €20m 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 helping 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 turn them into a more coordinated European effort.
