Launched in October 2022, the HealthData@EU Pilot project reached a first milestone by framing the scope and activities that will be performed during the Proof Of Concept (PoC) phase. The framing phase saw the drafting of a first high-level vision of the target architecture and defining an organisational framework to implement an EHDS solution. Starting in March 2023, the PoC phase aims to deliver and deploy a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) at the end of 2023 enabling the two first steps of the user journey :
The target MVP expected for December 2023, will focus on connecting three nodes (France, Denmark and Finland) and the European Central Services by setting up an eDelivery network. This MVP network will be used to centralize national dataset catalogues to the European one and to forward data permit requests from central services to the three nodes.
A first high level vision of the target architecture
The design of the target solution has been driven by three main guidelines : (1) build a scalable and distributed network that can easily onboard new nodes or host a new technical use cases, (2) leverage open source technologies and (3) propose a security- oriented solution. The infrastructure for each node comprises a cross-border gateway in charge of eDelivery communication with other nodes, a national
connector that provides all necessary features to fulfill the needs of the user journey steps to the nodes and crossborder engines that translate existing national capabilities of the nodes to a crossborder standard.
An iterative approach to deliver the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The full specifications of the solution are strongly dependent to tasks performed by work packages 6 and 7 and won’t be provided at the beginning of the POC phase (i.e. definition of the metadata standards or definition of the information that needs to be provided by an applicant during a Data Permit process). In order to parallelise tasks, the implementation of the solution will be done incrementally, by delivering multiple functional versions of the solution. We plan to deliver three product increments before December 2023, each one being an improvement to the prior version.
EHDS2Pilot Work Package 5 „Proof of Concept“ information and planning document.
About the EHDS2 HealthData@EU Pilot project
The EHDS2 Pilot HealthData@EU project brings together national data permit authorities, public health infrastructures and health research infrastructures, in order to enable linking and integrating data between data sources. This pilot project is a major first step that will allow practical validation of this concept i.e. the access to health data in Europe.
The EHDS2 Pilot project is very important because it taps into the wealth of health data which today is fragmented across Europe and research has difficulty to access this data for science.
Press release announcing the launch of EHDS2Pilot incl. list of partners
