Newsletter June 2024
Welcome to the VELES newsletter, the Smart Health Excellence Hub in South-East Europe. Find out what we have done in the last three months.
Fantastic News Regarding the EHDS
Let’s start with some great news – On April 24, 2024, the European Parliament gave the green light to the creation of the European Health Data Space (EHDS), marking a significant leap forward in healthcare accessibility and research advancement across the EU.
Here’s why it’s a game-changer:
- Accessible Electronic Health Records: You’ll enjoy seamless access to your electronic health records no matter where you are in the EU. From prescriptions to lab tests, all your crucial health information will be right at your fingertips.
- Fueling Research Breakthroughs: With anonymized health data sharing, it’s paving the way for groundbreaking research initiatives, especially into rare diseases.
- Robust Privacy Measures: Stringent privacy safeguards ensure that data sharing is strictly governed and only used for authorized purposes. Your sensitive health data will be in safe hands.
But that’s not all! This groundbreaking law opens doors for safe and secure health data transfers between EU countries, ensuring continuity of care, even if you relocate.
Plus, downloading your health record will be free of charge, empowering you with greater control over your health journey.
We Launched Our First Report
Over the past months, we have been working closely with our 15 Consortium Partners from four widening countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Cyprus) and three developed countries (Spain, Germany, Sweden) to launch our first report:
The State Of Play and Strategy for Innovation Ecosystem Transition Path
The report focuses on analyzing the current state and challenges within the health data ecosystems of the aforementioned widening countries. Additionally, it presents a strategy to strengthen Smart Health innovation ecosystems for the benefit of all stakeholders. This analysis is based on comprehensive desk and field research conducted with key stakeholders from local and regional ecosystems.
The report offers valuable insights derived from this research, which included examining relevant policy documents from both national and EU levels, and conducting interviews with key stakeholders. These discussions explored stakeholders’ perspectives on innovation ecosystems, as well as the primary and secondary use of health data within their national contexts.
Based on these findings, the report provides recommendations and a strategy for strengthening Smart Health innovation ecosystems, outlining the necessary steps for a successful transition.
The report identifies commonalities and differences across the four widening nations and emphasizes the need for further investments in technical, human, governance, and legal resources to establish robust health data spaces. This aligns with the experiences of the advanced partner countries, indicating that health data ecosystems are still in the early stages of development.
The outlined strategies and transition paths pave the way for a dynamic and collaborative health data ecosystem where innovation can thrive. By investing in robust technical infrastructure, promoting data readiness and governance, nurturing a skilled workforce, and ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, stakeholders can create an environment conducive to innovation.
Next Steps for VELES: We aim to formulate a transformational framework to be incorporated into validation exercises, considering common practices, existing gaps, and constraints, including security. This framework will propose a joint approach for digital transformation and delivery projects centered around four pillars:
Health Industry Digital Culture
Health Industry Place-based Innovation Ecosystem (innovative startups and SMEs)
Digital Approach (dream, design, deliver)
Data and Cybersecurity Preparedness Pathway
Our Second Plenary Meeting
From May 14-15, 2024, we gathered for the second in-person meeting of our Consortium. We were hosted by our dear partners from Cyprus in the stunning city of Larnaca!
Over the course of the two days, we:
- Showcased the progress made in our first year
- Strategized our future directions
- Discovered new synergies
- Reconnected and strengthened our bonds
Additionally, we gained valuable insights from presentations by:
- The National eHealth Authority of Cyprus on the new EHDS and the advancements made by Cyprus in this area
- The European Federation for Cancer Images (EUCAIM), the flagship initiative of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan
- smartHEALTH European Digital Innovation Hub, highlighting its achievements
- imec, focusing on projects related to the secondary use of health data
- The SHIFT-HUB project by Cleyrop
- A platform presentation by 3AE Health
We had a great time and we look forward to meeting again!
Do you want to learn more about us? We just launched a series of videos about us, our work packages, and our pilot studies:
- Cancer Treatment Pilot in Greece
- Alzheimer’s Pilot in Bulgaria
- Cerebral Tumours Pilot in Romania
- Dementia Pilot in Cyprus
We Became Members of the Smart4ALL Network
We are thrilled to announce our membership in the SMART4ALL network through the hub-in-a-hub service, which is available on the Marketplace.
In our pursuit of fostering strong collaborations in digital transformation, ESDALAB, as coordinator of the Digital Innovation Hub (DIH), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with VELES. This partnership aims to unite efforts and capacities to provide digitalization services for companies, educational institutions, and the public sector by interconnecting knowledge, technologies, and people.
By signing the MoU, our Consortium partners join the network of DIHs supported by ESDALAB and SMART4ALL through the hub-in-a-hubservice. This online tool showcases (E)DIHs’ and Excellence Hubs’ members on an interactive map integrated into the network.
The SMART4ALL Marketplace serves as a one-stop-smart-shop for experts and non-expert third parties seeking ICT technologies, offering a comprehensive platform for showcasing and accessing cutting-edge solutions.
We Partnered with Better AI Health
Talking about partnerships, we are happy to announce our collaboration with Better AI Health under the EU Horizon Europe program!
Better AI Health aims to create a distributed analytics research platform utilizing real-world health data, promoting a federated learning framework for decentralized AI in healthcare.
Through this collaboration, we aim to identify common goals and areas for intervention, enhancing the quality and impact of both consortia’s work.
“It is only if we see how to join efforts that we shall achieve something bigger. And joining efforts starts from developing a mutual understanding,” says dr. Irena Pavlova, from our Bulgarian Consortium Partner, GATE Institute.
Dr. Matteo Bregonzio, CTO of Datrix, adds, “A collaborative effort in communication and dissemination canonly amplify the reach and broadcast our missions to a larger public. Furthermore, cross-validation of ideas and methodologies will be very valuable to assess how to deploy federated healthcare use cases at scale as foreseen by the European Health Data Space agenda.”
On May 29, we organized the first joint webinar on federated learning. The guests included and the topics were the following:
- Kim Gammelgaard
- Matteo Bregonzio – Federated Learning in BETTER
- Boris Kraychev – How Federated Learning Fits VELES
- Johan van Soest – Challenges of Federated Learning in Healthcare
- Ana Grönke – PADME as a Federated Learning Tool for Healthcare
- Pietro Pinoli – FAIRification in Federated Learning
We Were at DIZ Conference
On March 28, our consortium partner from Romania, Cluster Imago-Mol, represented us at the Digital Innovation Zone Conference in Iasi.
Carmen Mihai delivered a presentation about how we at VELES are paving the way for the European Health Data Space by building the first Regional Smart Health Data Space.
We Participated at InnoHealth Satellite Event
Dimitrios Katehakis, director of the Hellenic Digital Health Cluster (HDHC), one of our Consortium Partners from Greece, presented VELES at the InnoHealth Satellite Event in Thessaloniki on May 17, 2024!
The event delved into critical aspects of health data management, emphasizing the importance of leveraging this data for health policy development. It also evaluated the readiness of healthcare professionals to integrate advanced technologies while ensuring data security.
We proudly showcased the transformative power of the Regional Health Data Space and introduced our groundbreaking Greek pilot project on cancer under the VELES Excellence Hub.
We Held the Health Data Thematic Webinar
On June 12th, we joined the Health Data Thematic Innovation Ecosystem webinar.
Organized by the Digital Health Uptake (DHU) initiative under ECHAlliance – The Global Health Connector, and the Hellenic Digital Health Cluster (HDHC), the webinar focused on advancing health dataspaces.
Seven experts discussed the future of health data spaces:
- Andy Bleaden, Communities Director, ECHAlliance
- Angelina Kouroubali, Research Coordinator, HDHC
- Georgi Petkov, Healthcare Lead at GATE Institute
- Dimitrio Katehakis, Director of HDHC
- Carmen Mihai, Cluster Manager of IMAGO-MOL
- Marios Neophytou, Senior Officer at NeHA
- Olga Galanets, Senior Project Manager of IDSA
How You Can Support Us
If you’re passionate about smart health and our progress toward establishing the RSHDS, connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or visit our website.
And if you think someone else might be interested too, please share this newsletter with them or encourage them to subscribe here.
Thank you for reading us,
VELES Excellence Hub Team