Icon Framework of medical records in Europe

Practical example and current challenges

  • Artificial intelligence is of great benefit to healthcare and patient well-being when its applications can be applied to data from different actors.
  • In fact, medical information and knowledge is stored in silos. Medical records are not physically in the possession of patients. Medical research is virtually a parallel universe and is based on theories and control situations. Decision-making and patient experience, however, are not documented and related data often unstructured. It is a matter of personal knowledge of doctors and patients and difficult to transfer digitally due to different formats.
  • In order to correlate data points, connect systems and orchestrate workflows to be able to generate synergy effects, a framework that includes the different data sources and providers is necessary. In concrete terms this means: The patients have full transparency as well as control over their data and has an interest that the data is used for his own benefit. At the same time, access to the data should only be made dependent on a specific purpose.
  • The challenge then is to ensure data security and data ownership as well as to carefully balance between medical benefit and legal responsibility. It must be ensured that patient data can only be accessed with the patient's consent or authorization. Building trust with patients and gaining acceptance to all these technologies depends largely on transparency and relatable communication of the bigger picture.
 Framework of medical records in Europe

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

  • GAIA-X enables a medical information system that can merge patient data into a centralized cloud service (so-called data lake). The data stored in the data lake can be connected to the patient using a secure communication channel using block chain technologies.
  • GAIA-X ensures data sovereignty, so that both European citizens and stakeholders in the health sector can trust the service and make the data usable. For example, the patient has the possibility to grant access to the data, e.g. reading rights for certain persons, to research.
  • GAIA-X provides the technical basis for storing all patient data so that citizens can make self-determined decisions about their health data.
  • This should help citizens and patients to have greater confidence in the digitization of healthcare, which could lead to more data being made available.

Use Case Team

  • Dr. Claudia Ivascu – Roche Pharma