A lot is currently ongoing at European level to push for the digitalisation of the health sector. NRENs can gather their efforts to liaise with the national eHealth initiatives, and promote the adoption of open, interoperable standards and services. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning should be able to provide us with new, powerful instruments for early diagnosis of illnesses and for implementing new user-centric services, along with delivering effective, personalised medicine.
SIG-DigitalHealthData exploits synergies among the NRENs, and assesses the possibility of joint efforts on the items identified by the GÉANT community as most relevant for eHealth. These are: security and privacy, policy, cloud, and dissemination of the new regulatory frameworks currently being defined at the EU Commission level.
SIG-DigitalHealthData will closely follow up the activities of the EOSC-Life EOSC cluster, collaborating with the life science community.
GÉANT services, based on open standards, can play a relevant role in the domain of Digital Health Data, to promote the sharing of medical data for the benefit of European researchers, and to tackle the challenges that an event like the outbreak of COVID has shown with dramatic evidence: viruses, diseases do not know political borders, no barriers, implying that our joint response should also be based on a global, cross-border medicine and health research.