Europe's Plan to Cut Cardiac Deaths by 25%: What Early Detection Actually Requires

The EU Safe Hearts Plan and the European Parliament's July 2026 summit set a clear target: reduce premature cardiovascular mortality by 25% before 2035. Here's what hitting that target actually requires in practice.

Europe has set the target. Now the harder question: what does hitting it actually require?

On 1 July 2026, the European Parliament hosted "Safe Hearts in Europe: Preventing Sudden Cardiac Death" - a cross-sector event bringing together clinicians, patients and policymakers to advance concrete, coordinated and measurable steps toward reducing avoidable cardiac deaths. The timing was not accidental: just one week earlier, on 24 June, the European Parliament's Public Health Committee had formally adopted its response to the EU Safe Hearts Plan, putting cardiovascular health at the top of the EU's policy agenda in a way that has no precedent.

The framework agreed at the Parliamentary event was precise: Identify · Refer · Protect · Train · Equip · Measure.

Simple to state. Harder to build.

What the Safe Hearts Plan actually commits to

The EU Safe Hearts Plan, unveiled by the European Commission on 16 December 2025, is the first ever EU-wide strategy dedicated to cardiovascular disease — Europe's leading cause of death. It is built around three pillars: prevention, early detection and screening, and treatment and care, with digital innovation, research and tackling inequalities running across all three.

The numbers behind the urgency are stark: around 250,000 sudden cardiac deaths occur in Europe every year, with significant inequalities in survival rates across Member States. The EU's stated goal is to reduce premature cardiovascular mortality by 25% before 2035.

One of the plan's key innovations is a proposed EU Protocol on Health Checks, to be developed by 2026, which will establish a common European approach to early detection of cardiovascular diseases — expanding screening in primary care and community settings, promoting the use of digital tools and registries, and supporting earlier diagnosis to prevent disease progression.

On treatment and care, the plan proposes a European network of cardiovascular health centres, integrated person-centred care, better access to innovative treatments and technologies, and — critically — the use of digital tools and AI to support clinical decision-making and long-term management.

ESC President Professor Thomas Lüscher framed what this requires in practice: "Early detection, timely prevention, and better long-term management using artificial intelligence as part of the future of cardiovascular care can dramatically reduce premature cardiovascular deaths in Europe."

What "identify earlier" means in practice

Elena Arbelo, Chair of the Advocacy, Quality Improvement and Health Economics Committee at EHRA, put the challenge precisely at the Parliamentary event: "If we want to reduce premature cardiovascular mortality in Europe by 25% before 2035, we cannot keep doing half-hearted prevention. We also need to find people and families at risk of sudden cardiac death before the first diagnosis is a tragedy."

That phrase — "before the first diagnosis is a tragedy" — is the sentence that matters most. Because across cardiac conditions, the most dangerous moment is consistently the one nobody is watching. A heart failure patient deteriorating at home between visits. A post-discharge patient whose fluid status is shifting while their next appointment is still weeks away. A high-risk patient whose individual physiological drift goes undetected because it falls within population "normal" ranges.

The Safe Hearts Plan's proposed EU Protocol on Health Checks is specifically designed to address this gap — to make early identification systematic and standardised, rather than dependent on which country, region or health system a patient happens to live in. The ESC's message at the Parliamentary event was consistent: every cardiovascular health check should be a gateway to prevention, and no one's chances of survival should depend on their postcode.

The role of digital tools and AI

The EU Safe Hearts Plan explicitly includes digital tools and AI as enablers across all three pillars — not as optional extras, but as mechanisms the plan depends on to deliver at scale. This reflects a shift that is already visible in clinical practice: Spain's CardiologIA Madrid 365 programme, launched in November 2025, is monitoring 28,000 cardiac patients remotely from Hospital Ramón y Cajal, with more than 11,000 clinical alerts managed in its first months — 400 of them critical, caught before they became emergencies.

This is what the "digital tools" language in the Safe Hearts Plan looks like when it moves from policy to implementation: a daily signal reviewed by a clinical team, acting before deterioration becomes a crisis.

Where Sensocor ML fits in this picture

At Monitoring Life, we have been working on one specific part of this problem since 2020 - the gap between cardiac visits, where deterioration develops in silence.

Sensocor ML captures three complementary signals — ECG (electrical), phonocardiogram (acoustic), and photoplethysmography (optical) — non-invasively, in 30 seconds, from a patient's home. These signals allow the derivation of mechanical cardiac biomarkers (PEP, IVCT, LVET) that shift before symptoms or weight changes become visible. Daily measurement means a clinical team can see a trend developing — and act — before it becomes an emergency.

The EU Safe Hearts Plan's goal of reducing premature cardiovascular mortality by 25% by 2035 requires exactly this kind of infrastructure: scalable, non-invasive, daily visibility for the patients who are not yet inside any monitoring programme. CardiologIA Madrid 365 reaches patients already connected to Hospital Ramón y Cajal's system. Sensocor ML is working on reaching the patients who are not.

The policy is in place. The infrastructure is being built.

The European Parliament has now responded formally to the Safe Hearts Plan. The EU Protocol on Health Checks is in development. National cardiovascular health plans are expected from all Member States by 2027. The political commitment is there — and it is more specific, more coordinated and more binding than anything that existed before December 2025.

What comes next is implementation. And implementation means moving from a policy commitment to "identify earlier" to a daily clinical reality — for patients across Europe, wherever they are, whatever health system they are part of.

The target is ambitious. It is also achievable. But only if "identify earlier" becomes something that happens every day, not just something written in a policy document.

Sources:

European Commission. Safe Hearts Plan, 16 December 2025. https://health.ec.europa.eu/non-communicable-diseases/cardiovascular-health_en