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On 11 and 15 September 2025, members of the irecs consortium offered an online training on AI in health to appraisal scheme experts who are responsible for reviewing European research grant proposals. The session started with a lecture by Professor Grinbaum on current developments and use of AI in healthcare after which we split up in break out rooms and discussed three separate cases, using a checklist with questions. In the last part of the training we discussed the pressing issues of each case and what needed to be addressed if this was a real research proposal.

We were happily pleased by the high number of people interested and willing to take the time to be trained on the topic. 120 persons in total attended the two events, and over 300 showed interest in the irecs training materials, based on an invitation by the European commission to all registered appraisal scheme experts. This clearly demonstrates that the irecs materials address a real need and that people are looking for information on how to incorporate ethical considerations on new technologies into their reviews. This was especially clear considering the high interest of the audience when discussing how to deal with ethical issues in practice. The interactive nature of the training also supported this practical approach to addressing ethical issues.

We are grateful to the attendees of the session and for their enthusiasm. We hope that the irecs materials are helpful in making them more aware of the ethical issues that are new to AI in healthcare contexts and those that are not so new, but need to be prioritized above other considerations.

We will carry out this training in November for the topic of Extended Reality (XR) and early December on Gene Editing. For the next online training session on XR, we already have over one hundred registrations.

Author: Mariëtte vd Hoven, on behalf of the AmsterdamUMC team

This training was offered as a joint AIOLIA/irecs workshop to appraisal scheme experts.