Electronic Health Records at People’s Hands Across Europe: The InteropEHRate Protocols

Abstract

Sharing of personal health data could facilitate and enhance the quality of care and the conduction of further research studies. However, these data are still underutilized due to legal, technical, and interoperability challenges, whereas the data subjects are not able to manage, interact, and decide on what to share, with whom, and for what purposes. This barrier obstacles continuity of care across in the European Union (EU), and neither healthcare providers nor data researchers nor the citizens are benefiting through efficient healthcare treatment and research. Despite several national-level EU studies and research activities, cross-border health data exchange and sharing is still a challenging task, which is addressed only under specific cases and scenarios. This manuscript presents the InteropEHRate research project along with its key innovations, aiming to offer Electronic Health Records (EHRs) at peoples’ hands across the EU, via the exploitation of three (3) different protocol families, namely the Device-to-Device (D2D), Remote-to-Device (R2D), and Research Data Sharing (RDS) protocols. These protocols facilitate efficient, secure, privacy preserving, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant health data sharing across the EU, covering different real-world use cases.