Poland Bids to Host WHO Office for AI and Health Cybersecurity

Poland's Ministry of Health has confirmed that the country is formally bidding to host a new World Health Organization office dedicated to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity in healthcare. The bid was put forward at a WHO forum with backing from Colombia, Kuwait, and the International Telecommunication Union, with the prize being a role as a knowledge hub for the organization's entire European region.

What Poland actually proposed

The proposal was put forward during May's World Health Assembly in Geneva, where WHO member states set the organization's priorities for the coming year. Poland presented its bid jointly with Colombia and Kuwait, backed by WHO itself and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which the ministry reads as a signal of genuine international support for the initiative.

The new unit, provisionally named WHO EURO GDO for AI, would operate as a knowledge hub for the 53 countries of the WHO European Region. Its scope covers three areas: supporting responsible use of artificial intelligence in health systems, strengthening cybersecurity at medical facilities, and developing shared standards for the safe development of digital technologies across the region.

Poland's numbers-based case

The Ministry of Health is building its bid around concrete data on the scale of the country's healthcare digitization. According to the ministry, Poland ranks first among large European Union member states for healthcare digitization, with a 92 percent digital maturity score in 2025 against an EU average of 83 percent.

Behind those figures sits an infrastructure that includes the Internetowe Konto Pacjenta (Online Patient Account), e-Prescription, e-Referral, and electronic medical data exchange, now functioning as a standard part of a system serving nearly 900 hospitals, more than 24,000 outpatient facilities, 166,500 doctors, and 219,900 nurses. The system covers more than 38 million citizens and over a million insured foreign nationals.

A growing threat to hospitals

The second pillar of the argument is the scale of cyber threats facing the healthcare sector. Data from CSIRT CeZ (the healthcare-sector Computer Security Incident Response Team) shows that recorded security incidents in Polish healthcare rose from 150 in 2021 to 1,441 in 2025, a nearly tenfold increase in four years. In March and April 2026 alone, four attacks were recorded against Polish medical entities.

The ministry argues that experience gained on the front lines of these attacks, combined with well-developed e-health infrastructure, gives Poland genuine competence to run a European knowledge center in this field, rather than a mere political appetite for a prestigious institution.

What happens next

Neither WHO nor the Polish ministry has yet given a specific date for a decision on the office's location. The final choice of host depends on further negotiations among member states of the organization's European region, and the process could stretch over several more months.

For Poland's healthcare sector and the tech companies serving public administration, hosting such an office would strengthen Warsaw's position in the debate over AI regulation in medicine, running alongside ongoing work on the EU's AI Act, whose rules for providers of high-risk systems, including some medical tools, start taking effect later this year.