AI Transforms European Health Data Space

The Promise of EHDS for European Healthcare

The European Health Data Space (EHDS) represents a groundbreaking initiative launched by the European Commission in 2022 to revolutionize healthcare across the continent. At its core, EHDS aims to enhance healthcare delivery, accelerate medical research, improve policy-making, and empower patients through better data access and utilization.

By facilitating the creation of comprehensive, high-quality health datasets, EHDS promises to drive innovation in treatments and precision medicine. This data-driven approach could potentially transform public health decision-making, making it more responsive and evidence-based.

For individual citizens, EHDS offers unprecedented digital access to personal health information. Patients will be able to view and share their electronic health records (EHRs), prescriptions, medical images, laboratory results, and discharge reports across all European member states.

Critical Challenges in Data Harmonization

Despite its ambitious vision, EHDS faces significant hurdles. The European Commission has set 2030 as the target for all citizens to have complete ownership of their health data. However, the current framework reveals two major shortcomings:

1. While designed to benefit the broader population, EHDS doesn’t adequately address individual patient control over personal health information.
2. Secondary data set generation remains inefficient due to heterogeneity and poor interoperability within and between patient records.

The current approach to health data curation is backward. Personal health data should be curated at the source rather than extracted in raw format and then repeatedly curated for each use case. This post-extraction curation process is resource-intensive, requiring expert intervention and significant time investment. As a result, vast quantities of valuable health data remain underutilized, while patients struggle with fragmented, low-quality personal health records.

AIDAVA: AI-Driven Solution for Health Data Management

To address these fundamental challenges, a consortium of 14 partners launched AIDAVA under Horizon Europe funding. This innovative project, initiated in 2022, aims to transform how patient health data is managed, integrated, curated, and utilized throughout Europe.

AIDAVA’s central innovation is an AI-driven virtual assistant designed to help patients maintain high-quality personal health records. This approach simultaneously enhances personalized care while enabling seamless secondary data use for research and public health initiatives.

The project responds to a critical problem: health information is scattered across multiple systems, making comprehensive access difficult for both patients and healthcare providers. Moreover, existing health data suffers from format inconsistencies and error rates as high as 10% – including potentially life-threatening mistakes. AIDAVA’s AI assistant aims to overcome these obstacles by facilitating integration and quality enhancement.

Four-Year Roadmap to Data Reusability

AIDAVA has established two primary objectives for its four-year initiative:

1. Maximize automation in personal health data curation to enhance reusability
2. Validate the solution through three concrete applications:

• Creating an EU-wide breast cancer registry that integrates data from three federated centers across different countries and languages
• Developing an automated smart risk score to support follow-up care for cardiovascular patients with recent myocardial infarction
• Automatically generating Individual Patient Summaries (IPS) in the EHDS-required European Electronic Health Record Exchange Format (EEHRxF), reducing the implementation burden for healthcare organizations

The consortium focuses on comprehensive data curation by consolidating information from multiple sources for each individual, then cleaning and standardizing it. The AI virtual assistant helps individuals curate their data and identifies issues requiring human intervention, either by the patient or a designated curator.

A Patient-Centered Approach to Health Data

“Most healthcare initiatives, including EHDS, focus primarily on population data. This approach fails to benefit individual patients, whose records remain heterogeneous and error-prone. Additionally, recurring curation of source data for secondary population-level use isn’t sustainable,” explains Dr. Isabelle de Zegher, AIDAVA’s clinical coordinator with more than 30 years of experience in digital health.

“AIDAVA proposes maximizing automation in individual health record curation while minimizing human intervention through AI technologies. Initial prototype testing with hospital patients shows promising results, suggesting we’re on the right path to solving healthcare’s persistent interoperability challenges,” she adds.

By putting patient needs at the center of health data management, AIDAVA represents a paradigm shift in how Europe approaches healthcare information – potentially unlocking the full potential of the European Health Data Space for both individuals and populations.

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