REALM Workshop: Patients Driving the Future of Medical AI

Organised on 19 March 2026 in Brussels, the REALM Patient Group Workshop brought together representatives from patient organisations across Europe, including groups representing patients with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and more.

The workshop aimed to collaboratively explore how AI-based medical software should be evaluated, certified, and monitored. Discussions were grounded in real-world use cases from the project, including PGx2P, an AI tool for pharmacogenomics-guided prescribing, and COPowereD, which supports the prediction of hospitalisation risk in patients with COPD.

Participants engaged in in-depth discussions on key themes such as trust in medical AI, the role of patients in the development and evaluation process, equitable access, regulatory flexibility and evaluation criteria. These criteria ranged from technical performance and data representativeness to patient experience and the broader impact on daily life.

Insights gathered during the workshop will directly inform REALM’s best-practice guidelines and living lab environments. These contributions will support the development of an evaluation framework designed to ensure that AI tools in healthcare are safe, effective, socially robust, and aligned with patient needs and values.

The organising team is currently preparing an infographic summarising the key takeaways from the workshop, which will be shared in due course.

Workshops of this kind are essential for meaningfully integrating patient perspectives into the development, evaluation, and deployment of AI-driven healthcare solutions.