On 20–21 October 2026, SYNTHIA was represented at the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) Forum 2026 in Brussels, Belgium. Bringing together stakeholders from across Europe's health research and innovation ecosystem, the event provided an opportunity to showcase SYNTHIA's progress in making health data more accessible, interoperable and ready for AI-driven research.

Under the theme “Translating research into long-term impact,” the IHI Forum 2026 explored how public-private partnerships can turn scientific advances into meaningful benefits for patients, healthcare systems and society. Through panel discussions, workshops, poster presentations and networking opportunities, the event highlighted the importance of collaboration in addressing some of Europe's most pressing healthcare challenges.

For SYNTHIA, launched in September 2024 as the first IHI project dedicated to synthetic data, the Forum offered a valuable opportunity to demonstrate how the project's work is progressing towards practical solutions for health data research and innovation.

From fragmented health data to more connected research

One of the key challenges facing AI-driven healthcare research is the fragmentation of health data. Valuable clinical information is often stored across different hospital systems, using different formats and standards, making it difficult to combine and use effectively for research. At the same time, protecting sensitive patient information remains essential. Addressing these challenges is central to SYNTHIA's mission.

During the Forum's dedicated poster session for early career researchers, SYNTHIA Partner Adrián Galiana Bordera from IISLaFe presented the poster “SYNTHIA eCRF: Standardized Multimodal Data Platform with Agentic AI.”

Within SYNTHIA, Adrián leads WP4 (Data Collection and Management) and contributes to WP6 (Synthetic Data Generation Tools and Methods), supporting the project's efforts to improve health data interoperability and advance synthetic data generation for healthcare research.

The poster showcased the development of the SYNTHIA electronic Case Report Form (eCRF), a platform designed to standardize multimodal health data directly at the point of collection. By bringing together structured clinical data capture, AI-assisted data mapping and interactive medical image analysis, the platform supports more consistent and efficient use of health information while keeping sensitive patient data within hospital environments.

Importantly, the SYNTHIA eCRF has been successfully deployed across all six SYNTHIA clinical use cases: lung cancer, breast cancer, multiple myeloma, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes. This achievement represents an important step towards overcoming barriers to health data interoperability and establishing the foundations needed for high-quality synthetic data generation and AI applications in healthcare.

 

Connecting expertise across the European health research community

Alongside the poster presentation, SYNTHIA partner Ellen de Waal from MATICAL, lead of WP10 (Communication, Dissemination, Training and Policy), engaged with key stakeholders relevant to SYNTHIA at the IHI Forum 2026, establishing valuable new connections and strengthening existing relationships, including with our IHI Project Officer Paloma Mallorquin.

The Forum brought together researchers, healthcare professionals, industry representatives, patient organisations and policymakers to exchange perspectives on how collaborative research can deliver lasting impact. For SYNTHIA, engagement with the wider IHI community is particularly valuable. Developing reliable and trustworthy synthetic data solutions requires more than technological advances alone. It also depends on bringing together clinical expertise, data science, legal and regulatory perspectives, and the needs of patients and healthcare stakeholders.

Events such as the IHI Forum provide an important space to strengthen these connections, share emerging developments and explore how innovations developed within individual projects can contribute to broader progress across the European healthcare ecosystem.

Turning the potential of synthetic data into healthcare innovation

Two years since its launch, SYNTHIA continues to advance its ambition of unlocking the potential of synthetic data for personalized medicine. Bringing together 39 consortium partners from academia, healthcare, industry and other fields of expertise, the project is developing and validating methods and tools for generating high-quality, privacy-preserving synthetic health data across different data types and clinical applications.

Through its six disease-focused use cases and the development of a federated platform, SYNTHIA aims to demonstrate how synthetic data can support healthcare research, improve the development of AI models and enable responsible innovation while safeguarding patient privacy.

The progress presented at the IHI Forum 2026 illustrates how the project's different areas of expertise are coming together to address practical challenges in health data collection, standardization and use.

As SYNTHIA continues its work, collaboration and knowledge exchange across the IHI community will remain essential to translating these developments into long-term value for researchers, healthcare professionals and, ultimately, patients.