Epi+ pilot phase — going live June 2027
Epi+ provides a structured, digital environment for national public health authorities to detect signals, assess risks, coordinate responses and document outcomes, both before and alongside the EU-level exchange of events. Designed for flexibility and inclusivity, the platform supports communication and collaboration across disease groups, administrative levels and sectors.
EpiPulse Events, ECDC's collaborative event-based surveillance system enables real-time information sharing between ECDC and Member States. However, before information can be shared at the EU level, event reporting and coordination needs to take place at national level, and most Member States do not have a dedicated digital tool to support these processes. Epi+ is being developed to fill this gap.
Designed for national needs
Epi+ events is built on DHIS2, a proven, globally deployed open-source platform, and extended to meet the specific requirements of European public health surveillance. It is configurable at country level, multilingual, and designed to operate under the complete control of national authorities.
As a multi-hazard system, Epi+ is not limited to a single disease group or threat category. It supports event-based surveillance across all infectious disease domains and public health threats, enabling comprehensive and coherent national surveillance.
Participating countries
The pilot brings together a mix of countries whose different national contexts will actively shape Epi+ into a system that can meet the needs of all EU/EEA Member States.
Pilot countries
- Croatia
- Greece
- Germany
- Italy
- Liechtenstein
- Luxembourg
- Norway
- Portugal
Observer countries
- Austria
- Belgium
- Ireland
- Malta
- Montenegro
- Spain
Platform scope
Comprehensive surveillance capabilities planned for the June 2027 launch
The initial platform scope has been defined collectively by ECDC and participating Member States, ensuring the platform delivers operational value from day one. Subsequent releases will progressively extend capabilities across outbreak management, interoperability and analytical tools.
Public health portal
A national entry point for health event management, documentation and situational awareness, accessible to authorised users across institutions.
Event management
Detection, tracking and documentation of public health events, including situation awareness, collaboration across sectors and institutions, epidemiological reports.
Risk assessment and response
Structured tools to support national risk assessment processes and coordinate public health risk assessment and response measures across disease groups and sectors.
Notifications
Configurable alert and notification mechanisms to ensure timely information reaches the right stakeholders at national and sub-national levels.
Access management
Granular user and role management, enabling national authorities to control data access across institutions, sectors and administrative levels.
Multilingual support
Full multilingual capability, supporting national languages and ensuring the platform is accessible to all users within each Member State.
Foundational principles
ECDC and piloting member states have developed four key principles to guide the development of Epi+, which are embedded in every aspect of the platform's design and governance.
Digital sovereignty
Digital sovereignty is the ability of an organisation to control its own data, infrastructure and tools, free from dependence on external vendors or foreign jurisdictions. For public health authorities, this means that critical systems for protecting citizens remain transparent, auditable and resilient, not subject to commercial interests or geopolitical risks.
Epi+ is designed with this principle at its core. Each national platform is self-contained and operated under the authority of the Member State, ensuring that the infrastructure protecting public health remains in national hands.
Open source under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL)
Epi+ is released under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL), in line with the Commission Decision of 8 December 2021 on the open-source licensing and reuse of Commission software (2021/C 495 I/01). Open-source licensing guarantees that no single entity can lock national public health systems into a proprietary dependency.
It also enables a growing community of developers and institutions across Europe and beyond to contribute to, audit and improve the platform. A collective investment in the resilience of European public health infrastructure.
Epi+ as a digital public good
Epi+ is committed to positioning itself as a digital public good, openly available, publicly documented and reusable beyond the boundaries of any single institution or country. ECDC maintains a public repository of documentation and release notes, ensuring full transparency over the platform's evolution.
A dedicated Epi+ public web presence will make the platform's development and national implementations visible to all.
Data under full national authority control
The production instance of Epi+ is hosted at Member State premises. The national authority is the data controller. ECDC has no access to national production data. This architecture ensures full compliance with GDPR and sensitive public health data remains under the sovereign jurisdiction of the country that generates it.
This approach represents a deliberate choice: interoperability with European systems such as EpiPulse Events is achieved through structured, aware data sharing.
EpiPulse events integration
Epi+ is designed to be interoperable with EpiPulse Events, ECDC's collaborative platform for epidemic intelligence at European level.
Interoperability between Epi+ and EpiPulse, planned at a later stage in 2027, means that once a national health event is assessed and validated, relevant information can be shared with ECDC and other Member States through EpiPulse Events in a structured, standardised manner. Similarly, events detected and reported in EpiPulse Events will be seamlessly shared with national Epi+ systems to strengthen timely situational awareness at all levels.
This closes the loop between national and European surveillance, eliminating the reliance on informal communication channels and ensuring that public health intelligence is rapidly shared, and enabling timely response to emerging threats.
The Epi+ community
Epi+ also represents a growing community of public health professionals, informaticians and policy actors who share a commitment to building a common, standardised approach to event-based surveillance in Europe. Participation of countries of very different sizes, administrative structures and epidemiological contexts has been essential to shaping a platform that is genuinely flexible and fit for purpose across the EU/EEA.
ECDC is nurturing this new community, creating a participative forum to build this common approach to event-based surveillance in Europe. An important part of this process is ECDC’s presence alongside the national stakeholders, including Epi+ annual meetings held at Member States’ premises.
An Epi+ Network, will be established to share experiences, inform the platform's development and sustain a collective investment in European surveillance capacity.
Roadmap to go-live
- Sep 2026: Testing begins on common ECDC platform
- Nov 2026: Training of Trainers — Rome, Italy
- Feb 2027: Setup of national environments at Member State premises
- Mar 2027: Training of final users
- Mar 2027: 3rd Epi+ Annual Meeting
- Jun 2027: Go live — first national systems operational, the roll out continues in 2027 and 2028
For further information on Epi+, please contact the ECDC EpiPulse team at epipulse
ecdc [dot] europa [dot] eu (epipulse[at]ecdc[dot]europa[dot]eu)