“Accelerating Innovation through Health Data”Professor Dipak Kalra, President of The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data, Belgium |
 |
Bio
Professor Dipak Kalra, PhD, FRCGP, FBCS, plays a leading international role in research and development of Electronic Health Records, including the reuse of EHRs for research. Dipak was a former London general practitioner and until recently the Professor of Health Informatics at University College London. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Gent. Dipak has over the past 25 years led the development of ISO standards on EHR interoperability, personal health records, EHR requirements and data protection, and he leads multiple EU Horizon 2020 and IMI projects in these areas. His current projects include the generation of real-world evidence in pregnancy, the governance of patient-centric clinical trials, the readiness of hospitals for value-based care, and advising on success factors for the European Health Data Space. Dipak is President of The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (www.i-hd.eu). This institute, which he founded in 2016, promotes the learning health ecosystem by developing strategies and enabling solutions that can improve healthcare and accelerate research through more trustworthy learning from health data. It is a multi-stakeholder not for profit body that supports healthcare and research organisations, and patients, to capture and reuse better quality health data. It promotes the adoption of interoperability standards, data quality assessment and improvement, good practices in privacy protection and focusing healthcare on outcomes and value.
Abstract
Healthcare services are facing increasing challenges with responding to an ageing society with multiple long-term conditions. They need to better leverage opportunities from digital and data innovations, by learning much more than they currently do from their health data and making their health data widely available for research. However, today our position is that much health data is still not interoperable despite the existence of standards. We need to engage more stakeholders in promoting the adoption of quality-assured interoperability standards and decision support algorithms, and to incentivise good quality data capture at source, so that we have health data that is usable and worth using. We need this health data, at scale, to accelerate the development of novel therapies, medical devices and algorithms including trustworthy AI, to support healthcare professionals and to support patients themselves with managing long-term conditions and for prevention. There are major investments taking place right across Europe in research infrastructures that can enable health data to be analysed at scale, whilst protecting privacy. We need to communicate with the public why it is important for their data to be used and reused, and how public and private organisations use of health data deliver value whilst at the same time ensuring robust data protection.