Trustworthy AI for Healthcare: From Research to Policy

The AISym4MED Final Event will take place in Brussels on 15 October 2026 and will mark the culmination of four years of collaboration under the Horizon Europe project AISym4MED. The event is designed as a multidisciplinary forum, bringing together policymakers, researchers, healthcare professionals and industry representatives to advance discussion around the responsible use of AI and health data, while showcasing the solutions developed by the project. At its core, AISym4MED addresses one of the most pressing challenges in European healthcare innovation: how to enable access to high-quality health data while ensuring compliance with privacy and ethical requirements. Through the development of a platform combining synthetic data, federated technologies, privacy-preserving mechanisms, and data and model auditing, the project contributes to research on more secure and trustworthy approaches to AI development in healthcare. The final event will pursue several objectives. First, it will showcase the key results achieved, including the platform itself, its technological building blocks and its validation in clinical use cases. Through these demonstrations, participants will gain insight into how AISym4MED brings together privacy-preserving approaches to support AI development in healthcare while addressing challenges related to data access, privacy and trust. The clinical use cases will illustrate how the project's different technological components can work together to support secure, collaborative and reliable medical research. Second, at the broader event level, the programme will place the project's research in the context of current developments in European AI and health-data governance, including the AI Act and the European Health Data Space. The event will create a space for dialogue between research, policy and practice and explore opportunities for the uptake and sustainability of AISym4MED results beyond the project's duration. A central discussion of the event will be the roundtable “Building Clinically Meaningful AI: Legal and Ethical Challenges Around Data, Evidence and Accountability.” Developing AI for healthcare requires navigating overlapping legal and ethical requirements relating to data protection, data minimisation, representativeness, bias, clinical evidence, patient safety and accountability. Privacy-preserving approaches such as synthetic data, federated learning and secure processing environments may reduce certain risks, but they also raise difficult questions about data utility, validation, reproducibility and the strength of the evidence supporting an AI system's intended clinical purpose and performance claims. Bringing together experts, the roundtable will explore the practical judgements and trade-offs involved in developing clinically meaningful AI. The discussion will consider how organisations can navigate tensions between data access and data protection, privacy-preserving approaches and clinical utility, as well as the need for robust evidence, fairness, accountability and effective governance within a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape, including the growing use of secure processing environments. Through these different elements, the event will convey a clear message: trustworthy AI in healthcare depends on trustworthy data, and innovation must go hand in hand with privacy, transparency and ethical considerations. The event will therefore be positioned not only as a closing moment for AISym4MED, but also as an opportunity for exchange between research outcomes, clinical practice and the wider European environment in which healthcare AI is developing. Agenda 09:00 – 09:30 | Registration and welcome coffee 09:30 – 09:50 | Opening session. Marilia Barandas (Project Coordinator, Fraunhofer Portugal) and Nihal YILDIRIM (Project Officer, European Commission HaDEA) 09:50 – 10:10 | Keynote. Trustworthy AI in healthcare (TBD) 10:10 – 11:00 | Session 1. Project Results Showcase: Validating AISym4MED Through a Clinical Use Case – César Gálvez-Barrón (Clinical researcher and Geriatrician, Consorci Sanitari de l’Alt Penedès i Garraf, CSAPG) 11:00 – 11:20 | Coffee break 11:20 – 12:20 | Session 2. AISym4MED solutions and platform overview – Esther Albertín Marco (Product Innovation. Health & critical sectors, Nunsys Group-Inycom) 12:20 – 13:20 | Networking Lunch 13:30 – 14:50 | Policy roundtable. Building Clinically Meaningful AI: Legal and Ethical Challenges Around Data, Evidence and Accountability. Moderated by Nayana Murali (Attorney-at-Law, TIMELEX). Panelists: Roxana Albu (Scientific expert Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications, Sciensano) Paul Quinn (Law Professor, VUB) Meeri Haataja (SAIDOT) Irene Heijink (UMC Utrecht) Milana Trucl (Scientist at the ELSI Unit, Sciensano) 14:50 – 15:00 | Closing remarks