Towards a European health research and innovation cloud (HRIC)

Abstract

The European Union (EU) initiative on the Digital Transformation of Health and Care (Digicare) aims to provide the conditions necessary for building a secure, flexible, and decentralized digital health infrastructure. Creating a European Health Research and Innovation Cloud (HRIC) within this environment should enable data sharing and analysis for health research across the EU, in compliance with data protection legislation while preserving the full trust of the participants. Such a HRIC should learn from and build on existing data infrastructures, integrate best practices, and focus on the concrete needs of the community in terms of technologies, governance, management, regulation, and ethics requirements. Here, we describe the vision and expected benefits of digital data sharing in health research activities and present a roadmap that fosters the opportunities while answering the challenges of implementing a HRIC. For this, we put forward five specific recommendations and action points to ensure that a European HRIC: i) is built on established standards and guidelines, providing cloud technologies through an open and decentralized infrastructure; ii) is developed and certified to the highest standards of interoperability and data security that can be trusted by all stakeholders; iii) is supported by a robust ethical and legal framework that is compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); iv) establishes a proper environment for the training of new generations of data and medical scientists; and v) stimulates research and innovation in transnational collaborations through public and private initiatives and partnerships funded by the EU through Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.

Health Outcomes from Home Hospitalization: Multisource Predictive Modeling

“…The integration of biomedical research information systems with in-place electronic health records in hospitals and in primary care centers having interoperability with patients’ self-tracking information would enable the development of innovative, dynamic predictive modeling approaches, opening up entirely new and fascinating scenarios for an interplay between clinical practice and biomedical research [ 33 , 34 ] . We have identified 4 main interrelated enablers of this scenario [ 15 , 17 , 35 ]: (1) cloud-based tools and services allowing secure analysis of patient-centric distributed and multi-disciplinary health-related information; (2) systems medicine approaches to generate clinical predictive modeling to feed clinical decision support systems and patient decision support systems; (3) implementation and evaluation strategies for real-world implementation and assessment of cloud-based services, and (4) governance, regulatory aspects, and service adoption throughout the health care systems; these are all key to harnessing the strengths and opportunities of LHS .…”

Developing a Transnational Health Record Framework with Level-Specific Interoperability Guidelines Based on a Related Literature Review

“…The need for interoperability has already been recognized for a long time, and many related studies have also been conducted [ 5 ]. However, previous studies have mostly focused on technical interoperability, such as with data formats [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ]. Interoperability includes not only the technical aspects, but also business processes, workflows, and policies.…”

Connecting data, tools and people across Europe: ELIXIR’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The federated EGA nodes forms a set of connected European COVID-19 Data Spaces, that bring together national health informatics infrastructure [13] and European archives such as those at EMBL-EBI [14]. This interconnected ecosystem will allow data from ongoing European projects as well as the many re-focussed national research programmes to be widely accessed, reused and linked to global COVID-19 initiatives.…”