The potential of health data is something that I’ve written about many times in the past, whether from a medical, societal, or entrepreneurial standpoint. This week the European Commission announced plans to create a more effective health data space that spans the continent and encourages secure data sharing across the European Union.
“I am proud to announce the first common EU data space in a specific area,” Vice-President of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas says. “The European Health Data Space will be a ‘new beginning’ for the EU’s digital health policy, making health data work for citizens and science,”
Access to data
The aim is to give researchers access to huge quantities of high-quality health data to support their research and development and innovation in areas such as vaccines, medical devices, and medicines.
“It will create a strong legal framework that will allow researchers, institutions, and industry to pull together and combine all their data. This can lead to the development of new medicines, antibiotics, next-generation personalized medicine, new medical devices,” said Stella Kyriakides, EU health commissioner.
It is also hoped that the new platform will help to encourage innovators across Europe and bolster the digital health market within the EU.
Better care
The platform will also strive to improve healthcare delivery via the more effective use of data. It will give people immediate and easy access to data in electronic form, which can be shared with health professionals across member states.
This will be supported by the use of a common data format across Europe to encourage both interoperability and security. The project will require developers of electronic health record systems to comply with these standards to gain access to the market.
The project will be supported with €810 million from the European Commission via EU4Health, Digital Europe, Horizon Europe, and the Connecting Europe Facility.
“It brings together the health data of almost 450 million citizens, and it’s going to be a fundamental game-changer,” said Kyriakides.
