The Nordic region has few urban centres and vast sparsely inhabited areas. The need for accessible health services has led to some forms of collaboration, but cross-border sharing of health data is still a challenge. The European Health Data Space (EHDS) offers potential for innovation and future sustainable services in the region, and addresses this challenge.
The Interreg Aurora funded project Nordic Health Data Spaces will address the programme areas readiness to adopt policy and legislation related to EHDS, discuss its potential, and how the innovation systems and healthcare systems should adjust and apply the EHDS policy to leverage innovation and create sustainable societies.
Common values and long-standing traditions across the Nordic countries have facilitated similarities in health data factors such as health registries, digital maturity, or common metadata standards for coding medical data. The project helps ensure that the work already done will be taken into account by those involved in the EHDS decisions, and make sure that they also address the sparsely populated areas.
In sustainable economies, critical mass is important to be able to transfer knowledge, influence people or carry out socially and ecologically sustainable development of the region. By ensuring data sharing across borders and re-use of health data, critical mass needed for the innovation of the region’s companies can be achieved.
The projects aim is also at the empowerment of the patients, leading to services for managing their own health and target prevention. A healthy population in the region is a pre-requisite for productivity, economic competitiveness and further development.
By sharing health related data in an secure and efficient way, the project will also support establishing reliable datasets that will help manage public health. The Sámi population will be one of the target groups while mapping the actors and assessing innovation potential. Furthermore, there will also be a mapping to assess how research health registries at universities and hospitals target the Sámi population.
Project Objectives
The Nordic Health Data Spaces project aims at strengthening local and regional cross-border governance, increase regional cross-border capacity, minimize border obstacles in sharing and re-use of health data, and to achieve a more effective health care system, by realizing the following objectives:
- Construct a baseline for data sharing toward health data spaces.
- Set a roadmap for preparing the health ecosystem and market for EHDS.
- Ensure ecosystem collaboration.
Project Results
The main results will be validated through use cases in the three countries. At the same time, the validation will ensure that sharing data across border will enable the much-needed accessible health services, and empowerment of the citizens that can access their data whenever needed. It will pave the way for cross-border re-use of data so that critical mass can be achieved for SMEs and innovation. It will also aim at increasing security in the region and ensure socioeconomic sustainability. The work will continue after the project by the partners and associated partners in their various roles, so that the findings and results of the project can be used while adopting EHDS. The results of the project will be published in scientific for and will also be made available on the project website.
The success of the NHDS project will be characterized based on the following:
- Solutions for legal or administrative obstacles across border identified
- Strategies and actions plans jointly developed with all the stakeholders
- Foundation laid for organizations to cooperate across borders
Contact information
Project Manager: Prabhat Ram (prabhat.ram@oulu.fi)
Project coordinator: Minna Isomursu (minna.isomursu@oulu.fi)
You can read more on the project website
