Project description
Electronic health records made easy for patients to manage
The electronic health record (EHR) collects, systematises and stores patient data in a digital format in order to improve healthcare systems. However, there is a low level of systems interoperability in Europe since data are collected in different silos and managed under converging security and safety conditions. This creates legal hurdles in the availability of data. The EU-funded InteropEHRate project will reverse trends by ensuring that health data are available when and where needed. It will provide patients with full control in usage and routes of their medical information through device-to-device and peer-to-peer protocol standards. It will also outline a set of new protocols for secure and cross-border exchange of medical evidence.
Objective
Today, citizens moving across Europe have very limited control on their own health data, spread out in different silos. Legal constraints may prevent controllers of these silos from exchanging the managed data, even in anonymized way, without the intervention of higher authorities. As a consequence, health data cannot be fully exploited for healthcare and research.
InteropEHRate aims to empower the citizen and unlock health data from local silos, using a bottom-up approach for EHR interoperability
1. mediated by the citizen: through the adoption of a D2D (device to device) standard, that, exploiting edge computing and short-range wireless technologies, allows the citizens to import their own health data on personal smart devices, and exchange them, in a confidential way, also without the internet, with healthcare professionals and researchers, without the intervention of other authorities;
2. authorized by the citizen: through peer-to-peer protocols for cross-border interoperability among EHRs and research apps, using decentralized authorization mechanisms based on citizens’ consent, to guarantee data accountability and provenance traceability, in compliance to patients’ rights and GDPR;
3. open and incremental: based on open specifications, connecting for-profit and non-profit data providers with different levels of interoperability, starting from a low level for secure exchange of unconverted data, to a high level combining knowledge extraction and adaptive data integration, to translate data to a common HL7 FHIR profile and into the natural language of the consumer;
4. A co-design approach and a specific governance model will manage human aspects related to ethics, laws, technology evolution.
User scenarios, presenting different security and interoperability requirements, will be validated by citizens and institutions belonging to six European countries.
Existing interoperability infrastructures will be exploited, including CEF building blocks such as eID.
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Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
00144 ROMA
Italy