Amsterdam UMC joins a groundbreaking 10‑year, €112M national program, AI4Health, that will embed trustworthy AI across Dutch healthcare. Within this large public‑private consortium, Amsterdam UMC and ACS play a leading role in the cardiovascular domain, under the scientific leadership of Prof. Folkert Asselbergs.

National AI alliance

AI4Health unites all Dutch university medical centers, major teaching (STZ) and general (SAZ) hospitals, patient organizations, health funds, insuring companies, regulators, and industry partners. Together they will build shared data infrastructures, methods, and guidelines to move AI solutions from prototypes to routine, reimbursed care. The program is funded by NWO (€25M) and over €80M in public and private co‑funding.

Cardiovascular focus

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of premature death, affecting more than 1.7 million people in the Netherlands and accounting for around 10% of national healthcare expenditure. Within AI4Health, Amsterdam UMC coordinates the cardiovascular work, targeting earlier detection, better personalized treatment decisions, and safer long‑term follow‑up, including care closer to home.

Five key CVD use cases

ACS researchers dr. Machteld Boonstra, Floriaan Schmidt and dr. Fleur Tjong are involved and under Prof. Asselbergs’ leadership, the CVD program develops and tests AI in real‑world care pathways across hospitals and primary care:

  • Early detection – AI‑enabled ECG and multimodal risk models for silent or early cardiac disease.
  • Diagnosis & staging – AI tools to standardize and speed up imaging‑based diagnosis and guideline‑driven work‑ups.
  • Heart team support – digital twins and multi‑agent decision support to personalize complex interventions.
  • Home‑based follow‑up – wearables and AI triage to detect deterioration early and reduce avoidable admissions.
  • Workflow optimization – prediction of next clinical steps and no‑shows to improve capacity and reduce waste.

From data to deployment

Cardiovascular use cases are embedded across the full AI4Health pipeline:

  • WP1 – Data & infrastructure: federated, FAIR CVD data across hospitals, registries and primary care, building on DCVA Health Data Hub and NHR.
  • WP2 – AI development: user‑centered, explainable, and federated models co‑designed with cardiologists, GPs and patients.
  • WP3 – Validation & impact: external validation, clinical and economic evaluation, and continuous monitoring in live care.
  • WP4 – Deployment: vendor‑agnostic architectures to plug AI safely into EHRs, imaging systems and remote monitoring platforms.

Patient‑centered and trustworthy

All cardiovascular innovations will be developed with strong involvement of patients and professionals, and aligned with the EU AI Act, EHDS and MDR. Equity, transparency and human oversight are explicit design requirements. Impact measures go beyond accuracy to include waiting times, admission rates, quality of life, cost‑effectiveness and environmental footprint.