Enabling the digital transformation of health and care

The vision outlined in the Communication is to promote health, prevent and control disease, help address patients' unmet needs and make it easier for citizens to have equal access to high quality care through the meaningful use of digital innovations.

It will also strengthen the resilience and sustainability of Europe’s health and care systems. By helping to maximise the potential of the digital internal market with a wider deployment of digital products and services in health and care, the proposed actions also aim to stimulate growth and promote the European industry in the domain.

The Commission intends to take further action in three areas:

• Citizens’ secure access to and sharing of health data across borders
• Better data to advance research, disease prevention and personalised health and care
• Digital tools for citizen empowerment and person-centred care

When it comes to research and personalised care, the Commission will:

• Set up a mechanism for the voluntary coordination of authorities and other stakeholders to share data and infrastructure for prevention and personalised medicine research. This includes a European network on genomics, and seeking to link also with ongoing '-omics' and human cell mapping initiatives;
• Support the development of technical specifications for secure access and cross-border exchange of genomic and other health datasets within the internal market for research purposes. This is to facilitate interoperability of relevant registries and databases in support of personalised medicine research;
• Launch pilot actions, pooling data and resources across the EU, to demonstrate the benefits of advancing research, disease prevention, personalised medicine, health technology assessment, as well as clinical and regulatory decision making;
• Support all the above by mobilising funds from Horizon 2020 and the Connecting Europe Facility (Broadband and Information and Communication Technologies), within the current envelopes, and consider further support from the next multiannual financial framework.

Should you be interested in reading more about this topic, the press release can be found here and the Q&As here.