2021.AI joins CLIC-BAIT project to shape the next generation of AI-powered clinical imaging in Danish healthcare

2021.AI is proud to be a partner in CLIC-BAIT, a landmark public-private initiative that will bring controlled AI out of the lab and into clinical practice across Danish hospitals.

A major new public-private partnership has received DKK 15.8 million in funding from Denmark's Innovation Fund (Innovationsfonden) to accelerate the safe and scalable deployment of artificial intelligence in clinical imaging. 2021.AI is one of the key technology partners in the project, known as CLIC-BAIT — Clinical Imaging Consortium for Broader Application of AI Technology.

Bridging the Gap Between AI Innovation and Clinical Reality

Hospitals across Denmark are experiencing an explosive growth in imaging data — from radiology and pathology to dermatology and ophthalmology. While AI holds enormous potential to support faster and more accurate diagnoses, the challenge has consistently been the same: getting proven AI solutions out of test environments and into everyday clinical workflows, safely and at scale.

CLIC-BAIT is designed to solve exactly that problem. Over the next three years, the project will develop a modular IT architecture that enables healthcare institutions to develop, test, validate, and continuously monitor AI solutions across the full spectrum of clinical imaging disciplines.

The initiative builds directly on the experiences and achievements of RAIT - the Radiological Artificial Intelligence Testcenter at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital and Bispebjerg and Frederiksberg Hospital - taking what has been learned in a controlled test environment and scaling it into a full national deployment framework.

A National Infrastructure for Trustworthy Health AI

The platform is being developed in close collaboration between private technology companies and clinical experts, IT specialists, and researchers within the future Region Østdanmark. The long-term ambition is for the platform to be adopted by all regions across Denmark, creating a national standard for the development and deployment of AI in healthcare.

Martin Magelund Rasmussen, Executive Director at Region Østdanmark, described the initiative as building "a safe motorway for artificial intelligence in clinical imaging - so we can scale solutions that work in one region to the entire country, ensuring consistently high quality of care regardless of where in Denmark a patient is examined."

From Clinical Validation to Global Commercial Potential

A distinguishing feature of CLIC-BAIT is its dual ambition: to improve patient outcomes in Denmark while simultaneously creating a platform with significant international export potential.

Troels Bierman Mortensen, CEO of DataFair and Project Lead, noted: "There is a massive international need for platforms that can securely manage data supporting the full lifecycle of clinical AI solutions. Through CLIC-BAIT, we are integrating leading open-source tools with existing health IT infrastructure - creating a unique foundation for growth and the export of Danish health technology solutions."

The clinical perspective was underscored by Adam Espe Hansen, Clinical Professor and Centre Director at DEPICT, Rigshospitalet: "This platform gives us the tools to continuously monitor that algorithms perform exactly as they should - whether it concerns cancer treatment follow-up or the rapid detection of bone fractures. Ultimately, it is about patient safety and selecting the algorithms that deliver real value."‍

2021.AI’s Role: From Clinical Blueprint to Scalable AI Platform

As a key partner in the CLIC-BAIT initiative, 2021.AI contributes its deep expertise in AI governance, monitoring, and lifecycle management - addressing one of the most critical challenges in clinical AI: ensuring that AI models remain accurate, fair, compliant, and trustworthy over time, not just at the point of deployment.

A central element of 2021.AI’s role in the project is to provide advisory expertise and contribute to a modular blueprint for clinical AI infrastructure, based on close collaboration with Region Hovedstaden. This blueprint defines the architecture, governance processes, and capabilities required to develop, test, validate, deploy, and continuously monitor AI solutions in a real-world healthcare setting.

Importantly, the blueprint is not intended as a one-off regional implementation. Rather, it is being shaped as a scalable and adaptable foundation - defining the requirements and structures needed to support broader adoption across healthcare environments.

Building on these learnings, 2021.AI’s GRACE AI Platform is positioned to operationalize and extend the blueprint into a industry-grade platform - enabling healthcare providers to adopt and manage clinical AI in a structured, compliant, and scalable way. While individual components may be piloted within the project context, the overall ambition is to translate the blueprint into a coherent platform offering that can support wider deployment across Danish regions and, over time, internationally.

In combination with emerging open-source components such as MONAI for medical imaging, this approach enables a flexible and sovereign AI stack - where best-in-class tools can be integrated under a unified governance and operational framework.

Through its role in CLIC-BAIT, 2021.AI is helping to establish not only a technical architecture, but a practical pathway for scaling trustworthy clinical AI - supporting Danish healthcare in taking a leading position in secure, governed, and internationally relevant AI adoption.

“One of the key challenges in clinical AI is not just building models, but making them work reliably and responsibly in real-world healthcare. Through the collaboration with Region Hovedstaden, we are starting to see what this looks like in practice. The ambition is to build on these learnings and shape a platform that can support broader adoption — both across Danish regions and potentially internationally,” Kim Tosti, Project Lead for the CLIC-BAIT Consortium at 2021.AI.