Support for European eHealth Interoperability roadmap for deployment

Considering and building on outcomes of related activities and projects[[E.g. from the H2020 topics PHC 34 – 2014, HCO-14-2016, HCO-15-2016, SC1-DTH-08-2018]], the focus is to support deployment and monitoring of eHealth interoperability meaning real life interoperable digital platforms and solutions for use by citizens, researchers, health services and the workforce across borders in the EU Digital Single Market. The support should comprise a coherent package of activities that will improve the deployment of interoperable eHealth solutions and platforms, with a significant number of citizens in several Member States accessing and providing their own health data in platforms. The deployment should consider interoperability of (electronic) Health Records across national borders, the empowered European citizen, compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation[[Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation): http://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj]] the Network and Information Systems Directive[[Directive (EU) 2016/1148 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 2016 concerning measures for a high common level of security of network and information systems across the Union: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2016/1148/oj]] and the operation in a European digital single market. The deployment should build on the Commission Recommendation on the European EHR exchange format[[https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/recommendation-european-electronic-health-record-exchange-format]] and be guided by strong and systemic contributions for better data and better computational approaches to advance disease prevention and personalised medicine. Emphasis should be given to specific fields of high societal relevance and high prevalence. Omics type of information associated to the use and exchange of health datasets should be strongly considered with special regard to analysis and corresponding further health-related data. Relevant activities of the eHealth Network[[https://ec.europa.eu/health/ehealth/policy/network_en]] should be taken into account. For all relevant data (e.g. from hospitals, doctors or user-generated) ethics and legal issues should be considered appropriately.

For grants awarded under this topic, beneficiaries may provide support to third parties as described in General Annex K of the Work Programme either in form of grants or prizes. The respective options of Article 15 of the Model Grant Agreement will be applied.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of up to EUR 3 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Large amounts of valuable health data are generated and recorded concerning EU citizens. This includes clinical and medical data that are collected at times of treatments or data generated by the citizens themselves on health and care, fitness and wellbeing. Opportunities to use these data for better health, to make contributions to personalised or precision medicine, better prevention approaches and innovative services are often missed because data do not become available and are not interoperable and portable to the extent necessary. Interoperability of digital platforms and solutions, making data accessible in an actionable form for exchange and portability is required to pave the way for better health outcomes and treatments. Efforts have been and are still invested in standardisation and harmonisation (including common clinical models, tools and agreed approaches), privacy and security (including data access and data integrity) and communication (towards citizens, patients and healthcare providers) to allow citizen/patient empowerment, advance health research and medical science, improve health for everyone and also define requirements for an appropriate data quality.

The proposal should provide appropriate indicators to measure its progress and specific impact in the following areas:

• Citizen-centred secure electronic health data use across Europe for citizens managing own health data;
• Support cross-border and inter-institutional interoperability solutions;
• Specific contributions made for improved health conditions, healthy working conditions and quality of life;
• Improved efficiency in terms of health economics and occupational health such as on timeliness of intervention or prevention approaches;
• Extended EU citizens’ management of own healthy life continuum across borders, actors and confinements;
• Improved level of accessibility, control and portability of health data for citizens;
• Open, extensible and harmonisation-based citizen health records solution for service and app developers;
• Easy and safe for citizens to provide and donate their health data for research;
• Contributions to requirements, specifications and guidelines for the exchange of images, image reports, laboratory results and discharge letters at national and cross-border level;
• Support integration with tools and services under the Digital Service Infrastructure supported by the Connecting Europe Facility.