We are delighted to announce that CogStack has joined EXIT-CVD — Evidence-Based Exit Strategies for the Cardiovascular Disease Continuum through Early Detection, Treatment and Evaluation — a five-year, €27.6 million European research programme launched at the end of April 2026.
EXIT-CVD brings together 42 organisations from 17 countries, spanning academic medical centres, MedTech and pharma companies, SMEs and patient organisations. The consortium is coordinated by Professor Pim van der Harst, cardiologist at the University Medical Center Groningen, and supported by the EU Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) — a public-private partnership between the European Commission and the European life sciences industry. The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) leads communication and dissemination across the project.
Why “exit points”?
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is rarely a single moment. It is a trajectory — running from underlying risk factors, through asymptomatic disease, to clinical events and chronic management. Along the course of the disease there are decisive moments: exit points where progression can be slowed, halted, or in some cases reversed. The challenge is that those moments are often missed, because the signals that mark them sit across different systems, different specialties, and different data sources.
EXIT-CVD’s premise is that if we can identify those exit points — and build the diagnostics, digital tools and therapeutic strategies to act on them — we can meaningfully change the trajectory of cardiovascular disease across diverse European health systems.
CogStack’s role
As part of this project, CogStack will be bringing real-world evidence capability grounded from routine healthcare data. Our work focuses on two themes that sit at the heart of the consortium’s approach.
The first is cardiovascular health in pregnancy and the postpartum period — particularly hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and the long-term cardiovascular risks they carry. Despite being one of the more predictable signals of future CVD risk, these events are often poorly captured in structured records, which limits both research and proactive follow-up. Working alongside consortium partners, we will use the CogStack platform — together with our open-source clinical NLP toolkit including MedCAT for clinical concept extraction and AnonCAT for de-identification — to identify cardiovascular cohorts in routine NHS data, surface comorbidity patterns, and support trajectory modelling that links a patient’s clinical history with signals from connected devices and digital health tools.
The second theme is data harmonisation. EXIT-CVD’s ambition only works if data from very different settings — hospitals, devices, registries — can be brought together in a consistent and trustworthy way. CogStack’s existing pipelines for ETL, SNOMED-CT coding via MedCAT, de-identification, and mapping to common data models such as OMOP will support the consortium’s interoperability and FAIR-data goals.
This work builds directly on capabilities CogStack has developed and published over the last decade across NHS deployments — most recently demonstrated by Foresight, our generative model trained on tens of millions of patient timelines and published in The Lancet Digital Health.
Looking ahead
With the EXIT-CVD project kicking off, the CogStack team is looking forward to working alongside our consortium partners — including the teams behind real-time blood-pressure monitoring devices, wearable platforms, and the broader academic and clinical leads across Europe — and to contributing to a project whose ambition is genuinely commensurate with the scale of the cardiovascular challenge.
🔗 Read the official ESC press release: Translating evidence-based “exit points” into clinical action across the cardiovascular continuum
