The current draft Regulation on the European Health Data Space (“space”) was published on 3 May 2022.
In April 2022, EHTEL offered a quick analysis of an early version of the Regulation on the space prior to its official announcement. EHTEL continues to pay ongoing attention to the developments of this health data space.
While the proposals for the space have taken some time for the Regulation to materialise (intimations of the space could be perceived much earlier in the first two decades of the 21st century), EHTEL now:
- Perceives a real before-and-after shift that will occur with the introduction of the Regulation.
- Believes that the speed-up of activities around digital responses to COVID-19 has already acted as a major accelerator.
- Anticipates that developments will move much faster from 2023 onwards.
- Likes the distribution of activities to different countries, regions and levels, and the coverage of health in a wide variety of institutions, agencies, and initiatives.
- Admires the bringing together of the various impulses around digital and data in a single Regulation that is meaningful for a wide variety of stakeholders.
More than this, EHTEL would now like to see a real, concrete focus on how the space will be implemented in practice. Hence, EHTEL:
- Plans for a series of activities that will bring together multi-stakeholders to act on the space.
Examples include policy makers/regulators, health and care authorities, industrial and commercial partners, and citizens/patients. - Aims to focus on issues that need implementation.
EHTEL plans to explore in eight ways how the directions taken by the new space can be used to:
- Concentrate on citizen-centricity and data-sharing, and help expand this trend further.
- Work out how data donation by individuals can be made easier and be understood by them.
- Examine how mobile devices can assist with making more rapid progress on the space and its use of data.
- Prioritise the fields of primary care/integrated care.
- Focus on cross-border care (whatever the “border”).
- Explore multi-stakeholder experiences in sharing good practices on uses of healthcare data, especially among EHTEL members.
- Examine the continuing relevance of the European Data Governance Act 2021 on the roles and functions of data intermediaries.
- Progress further than the simple sharing of health data to explore the potential for enabling the sharing of (other) different types of data.
After summer 2022, EHTEL aims to organise more concrete discussions on these challenging issues that surround the European Health Data Space. Above all, its focus will be on the practical execution and fulfilment of solutions to all these challenges.
Watch out therefore, especially in Autumn 2022, for further developments and insights to be offered by EHTEL.
Discussions and plans will be covered in a number of the conferences to be held by projects, now coming towards an end, in which EHTEL has been active: InteropEHRate; OPEN DEI; and vCare. The year will end with EHTEL’s own Symposium, which will explore what is next implementation-wise with the data space.