The European Health Data Space is a groundbreaking initiative that aims to revolutionize healthcare, research, and innovation in Europe. Launched by the European Commission in 2022, the EHDS is focused on enhancing healthcare delivery, research, policy-making, and patient empowerment.
One of the primary goals of the EHDS is to facilitate the creation of large-scale, high-quality health data sets to advance research and public health decision-making. These data sets are crucial for developing new treatments and precision medicine.
Individuals are also set to benefit from the EHDS, as it will enable them to access their electronic health records (EHRs), prescriptions, medical images, lab results, and discharge reports digitally across all of Europe.
Despite its potential, the EHDS faces challenges in harmonizing data for seamless reuse. Two critical issues include the lack of adequate control for individual patients over their data and the complexity and inefficiency in generating secondary data sets due to data heterogeneity and interoperability issues.
To address these challenges, a consortium of 14 partners has launched the AIDAVA project, funded by Horizon Europe. The project, initiated in 2022, aims to transform how patient health data is managed, integrated, curated, and utilized across Europe by developing an AI-driven virtual assistant. AIDAVA seeks to provide patients with high-quality personal health records, enabling personalized care and facilitating seamless and high-quality secondary data use.
The AIDAVA project has two main objectives: maximizing automation in the curation of personal health data to increase reusability and testing the solution with concrete actions such as establishing an EU-wide breast cancer registry, computing smart risk scores for cardiovascular patients, and generating Individual Patient Summaries in the required format for the EHDS.
The consortium is focused on data curation by integrating data from multiple sources connected to each individual, cleaning, and homogenizing it. The AI-driven virtual assistant will assist individuals in curating the data and flagging issues that require human intervention.
Isabelle de Zegher, MD, MSc, the clinical coordinator of AIDAVA, with over 30 years of experience in digital health, emphasizes the importance of focusing on individual patient records rather than population data. She highlights the potential of AI technologies to automate the curation of health records and minimize the need for human intervention.
Isabelle de Zegher will be presenting the progress of the AIDAVA project at the upcoming HIMSS Europe event in Paris from 10-12 June, showcasing the initial results and advancements in solving the long-standing problem of lack of interoperability in healthcare.
Overall, the EHDS and projects like AIDAVA are paving the way for a more connected, efficient, and patient-centric healthcare system in Europe.
