In short
HeDERA (Health Data Enabled for Re-use Across Belgium) supports the mission of the Belgian Health Data Agency (HDA) to facilitate secondary use of health, healthcare and well-being data in a safe, uniform, and transparent environment. The project will especially support Belgium’s efforts to enlarge the capacity of the HDA, ensuring its connection, alignment and technical interoperability with the European Health Data Space and other European developments, and including it in the European secure peer-to-peer infrastructure to foster secondary use of health data, HealthData@EU.
HeDERA is coordinated by the Belgian Federal Public Service (FPS) Health, Food chain safety and Environment, in partnership with Sciensano (the unit EU health information system, within the service Health Information).
Project description
HeDERA aims to contribute to the main objectives of the Belgian HDA, which are to :
- establish a national governance and management structure for re-use of health data in Belgium;
- set up a core management system as a central contact point to record and process data access applications for Belgium;
- implement metadata standards, metadata interoperability and exchange principles defined, extended and maintained for Belgium;
- conduct data profiling activities for enhancing data quality and to model, generate and implement Reference Data and Master Data and its management related to EU guidelines and best practices;
- set up a HDA Academy for the improvement of health data literacy, to train and build capacity on data FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) for metadata and data.
Building upon the above objectives of the HDA, the HeDERA project will complement its services, infrastructures and activities by:
- Building further on the Belgian core management system as a central contact point to record and process data access applications from the European Union (EU);
- Ensuring the metadata interoperability and exchange principles defined, extended and maintained at EU level;
- Extending the Belgian Health Data Metadata Catalogue to enable upstream interoperability with the EU;
- Identifying the needs for a secure processing environment infrastructure based on existing solutions and best practices in the EU;
- Setting up a cross-border gateway for secondary use of health data;
- Liaising between EU initiatives and Belgian stakeholders on EHDS projects, pilots and activities.
The connection between the European developments and the Belgian HDA is critical, as the HDA needs to align and be technically interoperable with European initiatives, such as the Healthdata@EU pilot project (in which the EHDS technical infrastructure will be piloted) and the European central services including the eDelivery.
With the support of this project, the HDA will be able to stimulate evidence-based healthcare, scientific research, innovation, and policy making which will lead to improved health of Belgian and European citizens.
The HeDERA project is divided in 5 work packages (WP):
- WP1 Management and Coordination. Lead: FPS
- WP2 Dissemination, communication, training and support. Lead: FPS
- WP3 Alignment with and follow-up activities on European level. Lead: FPS
- WP4 Proposal of Secure Processing Environment for Health Data. Lead: Sciensano
- WP5 Connecting with the HealthDATA@EU infrastructure. Lead: Sciensano
