Published on 30.09.2022 30.09.2022

TEHDAS convenes European initiatives to discuss impact of EHDS proposal

The proposal on the European health data space has implications to all European health data initiatives. TEHDAS organised a workshop to gain more understanding of how other initiatives see the impact and how to strengthen co-operation.

The European Commission’s legislative proposal on the European health data space  (EHDS) has prompted a need for health data initiatives across Europe to enhance co-operation. TEHDAS, the joint action Towards the European Health Data Space, held a workshop on 26 September with a focus on exchanging views and exploring synergies between four European health data initiatives.

The online workshop convened around 60 participants from four European initiatives – TEHDAS, DARWIN EU, 1+MG and the EHDS2 pilot project – with debate focusing on four themes: data governance and sustainability; data quality; infrastructure; and data access and consent.

Experts taking part in the discussions identified several areas for further collaboration and agreed to work together to find common solutions.

“The timing was right to bring together experts that are working on the same areas of health data to evaluate the impacts of the EHDS proposal on these initiatives and how to address them,” said TEHDAS Co-ordinator Markus Kalliola from the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra.

EHDS will create a legal framework for data sharing

The upcoming European health data space will create an EU-wide legal framework for secure and sustainable cross-border use of health data for secondary purposes such as research and policymaking. The cross-border sharing of health data has so far been project-based and currently there are no legal bases or common practices for the secondary use of health data in Europe.

The four initiatives share the goal of facilitating health data use and unleashing the benefits of such data. DARWIN EU, an initiative by the European Medicines Agency, aims to provide timely and reliable data on the use of medicines. The goal of the 1+MG initiative is to make the genome information of at least one million European citizens safely accessible for joint European research. The EHDS2 pilot project will test European data sharing in practice.

TEHDAS will continue to support the pan-European discussion on the proposal, which will continue at the next TEHDAS project forum later this year.