Digital Health (DH) Convener

The Digital Health Convener (DH-Convener) initiative aims to realize the 4P medicine (personalized, preventive, precise, and participative) concept by establishing a connected health model to integrate Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) with Electronic Health Record (EHR).

We plan to develop a person-centered open-platform that provides „security and interoperability as a service“ to extend EHR with PGHD for primary and secondary use of health data. The platform will adopt health data governance principles and European Health Data Space (EHDS) frameworks.

The DH-Convener platform will support data collection, organization, and interoperability in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), through the following modules:

  • Data collector module: collects and organizes data from personal health apps.
  • Data securer module: conforms to the GDPR compliance requirements in data privacy and security.
  • Data integrator module: establishes interoperable health data exchanges between mHealth collected data and EHR, using healthcare standards and interoperability frameworks, namely Health Level 7 (HL7), Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), and Continua guidelines for personal health systems interoperability.
  • Data connector module: monitors and foresees local and global epidemiological trends through sharing statistics with World Health Organization (WHO) blockchain-based platform (MiPasa).

Accordingly, the DH-Convener not only tackles the state-of-the-art in mHealth technology for precision medicine, but also it aims to build the ecosystem for connected digital health within EHDS.

The DH-Convener concept won the Austrian BMK ministry Nexus Digital Health Innovation challenge to organize health data for Austria’s future national health system (May 2020).

To realize the DH-Convener initiative, we carry out the following activities:

Technically:

  • Introducing the DH-Convener concept to the HL7-international workgroup of patient empowerment. Currently, we create the DH-Convener use case as a part of the HL7 whitepaper on patient-contributed data.
  • Creating synergy with similar EU projects. We are an associated collaborator of the EU Health Outcomes Observatory (H2O) project.
  • Developing a toolkit for GDPR implementation and compliance in digital health.
  • Analyzing and comparing the different data sharing models and platforms across Europe.

Strategically (adopting Open Innovation in Science and roadmapping techniques):

  • Establishing national and European partnerships for developing the DH-Convener open platform through the upcoming EU funding scheme.
  • Linking and harmonizing our efforts with European and global health organizations, e.g., the WHO, International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI), ECHAlliance, and others.
  • Adopting EU frameworks and recommendations created by EU projects, e.g., TEHDAS, Digital Health Europe, EHDEN, etc.
  • Conducting co-creation workshops with patients and stakeholders on health data democratization, and patients empowerment and engagement.
  • Participation in the DAYONE workshops to create future health data scenarios in Europe. We launched an interactive toolkit for these scenarios and a questionnaire on how to apply them within EHDS. We presented this toolkit at the Medical Informatics in Europe conference (MIE 2022).

Thus, the DH-Convener participates in paving the way for self-care in Europe as a key component of personalized medicine.

For more information see this publication

DH-Convener is selected as finalist of the X-eHealth Interoperability Award 2022!

Kontaktperson

Rada Hussein, PhD, FIAHSI

Principal Investigator

+43 (0) 5 7255 82713 enqn.uhffrva@quc.yot.np.ng