Poland looks set to become the first country in Europe to deploy AI-based imaging diagnostics at the scale of an entire national, public healthcare system. Not through a regional pilot or a handful of hospital contracts, but via a single centrally-run platform meant to reach nearly every public hospital in the country.
The tender
The project will run on a new national digital health infrastructure (Platforma Usług Inteligentnych, PUI) managed by Poland's Centre for e-Health (Centrum e-Zdrowia, CeZ). PUI is part of a tender with a total budget of approximately PLN 150 million (€35 million), and is one of the largest investments in AI in healthcare in Europe. CeZ ran a tender covering five clinical AI use cases and has now selected a vendor for each:
- Areas 1 & 2 — chest CT pathology detection, and ischemic/hemorrhagic brain lesion detection: Pixel Technology with Transition Technologies Group
- Area 3 — traumatic skeletal changes on conventional X-ray: Billennium
- Areas 4 & 5 — breast cancer detection on mammography, and pathological findings on chest X-ray: Carebot (Czech Republic) together with Synektik (Poland)
Two contracts are already signed: a nearly PLN 11 million (~PLN 10.97m net; €2.55 million) mammography deal, and a PLN 13.2 million (€3.06 million) chest X-ray deal, both awarded to the Carebot–Synektik consortium and financed under Poland's National Recovery Plan (KPO). In the consortium, Carebot supplies the MDR-certified AI models, already used clinically in 15+ countries, while Synektik, whose PACS systems run at 230+ Polish sites, handles integration, national rollout and maintenance.
The wider PUI project sits inside a roughly PLN 150 million (€35 million) KPO-funded budget and is meant to eventually connect close to 400 hospitals. About 80% of hospitals have already tested the integration layer, sending test DICOM files and receiving results back, separately from the model procurement itself. A custom AI infrastructure layer based on NVIDIA DGX B200 hardware is being installed alongside the CeZ-built orchestrator, rather than the project relying on an existing vendor cloud.
Why it matters
Poland performs up to 20 million chest X-rays a year and, per CeZ's own figures, has fewer than 4,600 practicing radiologists nationally, a workload-to-specialist ratio that centralised AI triage is explicitly meant to help with. Every AI result is meant to function as an instant "second opinion" and prioritisation aid, not a replacement for the radiologist's own read.
The highlights, from where we sit
- It's a large, national tender, not a pilot. PLN 150m (€35 million), ~400 hospitals, one platform for the whole public system.
- Custom-built infrastructure, not off-the-shelf. Rather than plugging into an existing hyperscaler AI service, CeZ is standing up its own infrastructure and orchestrator specifically for this.
- Multiple use cases, multiple vendors. Five distinct clinical areas were tendered separately, resulting in three different vendor/consortium combinations rather than one AI supplier for everything.
- Poland joins a short list. After the UK, the Netherlands and Norway, Poland is the next European country attempting a single-platform, national approach to AI in radiology, a notably different path from the country-by-country, hospital-by-hospital roll-outs seen elsewhere.
- Worth watching closely. In our experience, this kind of centralised, whole-system rollout is not trivial to get off the ground. Procurement, integration, and clinical adoption all have to land at once, across hundreds of sites. Two of five contracts are signed and one platform layer is mid-integration; the harder test is what happens once all five areas are live across ~400 hospitals. Time will tell where this heads.
Sources
- ITwiz — "Polska jako pierwsza w Europie wdroży AI w diagnostyce na skalę ogólnokrajową"
- Centrum e-Zdrowia — "Platforma Usług Inteligentnych – realne wsparcie w diagnostyce obrazowej"
- Brandsit — "Synektik and Carebot are to implement AI for mammography in e-Health"
- CEO Magazine Poland — "Synektik to deploy AI for chest X-ray analysis under PLN 13.2m contract"
