Transformation of health and care in the Digital Single Market

This report shows that 64% of respondents to the consultation indicated that high-performance computing, big data analysis and cloud computing for health data research and personalised medicine should be advanced, while 18% of the respondents specified that such research should not be advanced.

Overall, the respondents acknowledged the benefits of medical data sharing:

• 83% of over 1400 respondents either agree or strongly agree with the statement that “sharing of health data could be beneficial to improve treatment, diagnosis and prevention of diseases across the EU";
• 73.6% of all respondents identify improved possibilities for medical research as a reason for supporting cross border transfer of medical data.

However, major barriers to the cross-border transfer of medical data were identified:

• Risks of privacy breaches and of cybersecurity;
• Current lack of infrastructure;
• Heterogeneity of electronic health records.

The respondents put forward several options to overcome these barriers:

• Developing standards for data quality and reliability;
• Standardizing electronic health records;
• Supporting interoperability with open exchange formats;
• Propose legislation setting the technical standards enabling citizen access and exchange of Electronic Health Records across the EU.

Based on the analysis of the consultation, the Commission may decide to take additional policy measures that will promote digital innovation in relation to healthcare, therefore providing opportunities to profile in silico medicine as one of the options to tackle the above-mentioned barriers.

Background

In July 2017, the Commission published a Roadmap on “Transformation of health and care in the Digital Single Market” specifying the Commission’s planned activities in this area, including a public consultation. The purpose of the consultation that ran until October 2017 was to define the need and scope of policy measures that will promote digital innovation in improving people’s health and address systemic challenges to healthcare systems. In this context, the consultation sought to collect information on cross-border access and portability of personal health data, sharing of resources (i.e. scientific research expertise, data capacity and advanced digital infrastructure), measures to ensure widespread uptake of digital innovations.

For more information, the full report published by the Commission is available here.