Brussels wants to create EU health data space to streamline access

Brussels desires to make European well being knowledge simpler to entry all through the continent, with a view to cut back waste and enhance drugs analysis.

The European Fee goals to permit sufferers to acquire their medical knowledge on-line and in a Europe-wide single format by 2025, which might even be accesible by all sorts of professionals, together with regulators, researchers and docs.

It additionally estimates that inside ten years, its plans for a European well being knowledge area might result in financial savings of greater than €10 billion.

In accordance with Vice-President of the European Fee, Margaritis Schinas, the system can be unprecedented.

“Well being knowledge is energy and well being knowledge is the blood working by the veins in our well being care techniques,” Schinas informed reporters on Tuesday. “And our proposal for a European Well being knowledge area, is the primary of its variety worldwide. It’s a milestone for our digital transformation and an actual revolution within the European medical historical past.”

Brussels says the modifications would result in a severe quantity of financial savings in value, with medical prescriptions on paper, for instance, nonetheless being broadly used throughout the EU.

The brand new system would permit sufferers to entry their prescriptions on-line inside their resident member state, in addition to in others.

Arthur Dauphin, a digital undertaking supervisor at shopper organisation France Assos Well being, informed Euronews that he’s conscious of the dangers of such a centralised system, but additionally recognises the advantages that may come from it.

“Well being customers are very inclined to share their well being knowledge, however not simply anyhow,” Dauphin mentioned. “And so it’s true that finally this new proposal is how this European well being space can create an area of belief by which we might share its well being knowledge for the good thing about all as a result of it’s actually the profit for the best quantity. 

“There’s additionally a robust expectation on the a part of residents and so that is how this area can contribute to it, whether or not it’s on questions of safety, on questions of redistribution or the worth of this knowledge.”

The proposal will now want approval from the European Parliament and EU governments.