Harnessing generative AI to bring clinical guidelines closer to everyday care — and make patients active partners in treatment decisions.

GUIDE-AI is a European project funded by the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) that is developing generative AI tools to help healthcare professionals navigate complex clinical guidelines and support patients in better understanding their treatment options.

Chronic heart, lung and kidney diseases affect millions of people across Europe. While evidence-based clinical guidelines are essential to ensuring high-quality care, their increasing length and complexity — often running to hundreds of pages — can make them difficult for busy healthcare professionals to navigate and apply consistently in everyday clinical practice.

As a result, many patients do not receive all the treatments recommended by current evidence.

GUIDE-AI aims to help bridge this gap.

The project is developing innovative “guideline navigators” powered by large language models (LLMs). These tools will help clinicians quickly identify evidence-based treatments tailored to an individual patient’s clinical situation.

At the same time, GUIDE-AI will use the same AI technology to provide patients with clear, accessible explanations of why a particular treatment is being recommended. In this way, the project aims not only to support better implementation of clinical guidelines, but also to strengthen health literacy and shared decision-making between patients and healthcare professionals.

The approach will be developed and tested across four major chronic conditions:

• heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF);
• chronic kidney disease (CKD);
• chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD);
• asthma.

The ambition is to create a scalable approach that could eventually be extended to other chronic diseases.

Bringing the citizens’ and patients’ perspective into GUIDE-AI

Cittadinanzattiva APS, through Active Citizenship Network (ACN) and the National Coalition of Associations for Patients with Chronic and Rare Diseases (CnAMC), together with the German patient organisation BAG Selbsthilfe, has a key role in ensuring that the perspectives, needs and experiences of patients and their families are integrated throughout the development and evaluation of the GUIDE-AI tools.

This contribution is particularly important in a project based on artificial intelligence: technological innovation can deliver real value only if it is developed around the people who will ultimately experience its impact.

Cittadinanzattiva will:

• contribute to a structured panel involving healthcare professionals, patients and policymakers, fostering dialogue, trust and exchange throughout the project;
• select and coordinate five representatives of Italian patient advocacy associations, external to the consortium, who will contribute to evaluating the usability and effectiveness of the guideline navigators;
• contribute to the review of the study protocol and patient-facing materials, as well as to the design of patient-reported outcome and experience measures (PROMs/PREMs);
• organise a European webinar involving civil society organisations and patient advocacy groups;
• contribute to the project’s visual identity and digital presence, while connecting GUIDE-AI with Cittadinanzattiva’s national and European networks.

Through this involvement, we will work to ensure that GUIDE-AI develops not only effective AI tools, but solutions that are understandable, trustworthy, accessible and genuinely useful to patients and healthcare professionals.

Cittadinanzattiva – Active Citizenship Network took part in the project’s kick-off meeting in Berlin on 28–29 April 2026, hosted by the consortium coordinator, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Read more about the kick-off meeting

For more information

GUIDE-AI project factsheet – Innovative Health Initiative

The GUIDE-AI consortium

GUIDE-AI brings together 19 organisations from eight countries — Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Estonia, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Israel — combining expertise from universities, healthcare and research institutions, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and patient organisations.

Universities, research organisations and non-profit bodies

• Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (DE) — coordinator
• Università degli Studi di Pavia (IT)
• University Medical Center Groningen (NL)
• University of Maribor (SI)
• University of Tartu (EE)
• Medizinische Hochschule Brandenburg (DE)
• Clalit Health Services (IL)

Companies and SMEs

• ICS Maugeri SPA (IT)
• Ecodynamics GmbH (DE)
• Qurasoft GmbH (DE)
• T-Systems (DE)

Pharmaceutical companies (EFPIA)

• AstraZeneca (UK / DE / SE)
• GlaxoSmithKline (DE / UK)
• Takeda (DE / CH)

Patient organisations

• Cittadinanzattiva APS (IT)
• BAG Selbsthilfe e.V. (DE)

Duration and funding

Project duration: 48 months (2026–2030)

GUIDE-AI was officially launched at the consortium kick-off meeting held in Berlin on 28–29 April 2026.

GUIDE-AI is funded by the Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (IHI JU) under Grant Agreement No. 101253015. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and EFPIA.