As the HealthyCloud project has now formally ended, it is now time to highlight the main achievement of the project, the Strategic Agenda for the European Health Research and Innovation Cloud (HRIC).
The objective of HealthyCloud was to generate a number of guidelines, recommendations, and specifications that will enable distributed health research across Europe in the form of a Ready-to-implement Roadmap. This roadmap together with the feedback gathered from a broad range of stakeholders is the basis for the final HealthyCloud Strategic Agenda for the European Health Research and Innovation Cloud (HRIC).
EGI’s role in the project was the identification and analysis of existing European computational infrastructures for the processing of sensitive health data.
From the HealthyCloud website:
The idea of a European Health Research and Innovation Cloud (HRIC) for researchers, healthcare professionals, industry and policy makers across Europe was born during a workshop organised by the European Commission (EC) in 2018. As a result of this workshop, the HealthyCloud project was funded with the aim of developing the Strategic Agenda of the HRIC together with relevant stakeholders.
Based on the landscape analysis carried out by EGI, and based on the outcome of discussions the project carried out with various initiatives it was concluded that it was not necessary to create a new infrastructure for the HRIC, but instead to have minimal coordination and orchestration function among existing entities. Five services were however specified, that the HRIC should provide:
- A monitoring service for health-related research
- A legal/regulatory guidance service
- A metadata standards and data interoperability guidance service
- A health research community interface service, with the EOSC
- A health research community interface service, with HealthData@EU
The HRIC in the European health data sharing landscape
The Strategic Agenda recognised the importance of alignment of the HRIC with other relevant initiatives, particularly the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the European Health Data Space (EHDS), although it did not attempt to dictate a particular approach to adopt. The EOSC Association, in recognition of the importance of Data Spaces and stakeholder groups in industry, and of the advanced development of the EHDS relative to other Data Spaces, is in the process of setting up a Task Force on the Health Data Space, whose activities could contribute towards further understanding the legal frameworks within which data sharing and exploitation may take place, and the standards, data preparation procedures and interoperability requirements likely to be involved. EGI Foundation is a member of the EOSC Association, and is also a partner in the EOSC Focus project which supports it and which has recently published a deliverable about the Common European Data Spaces.
Moreover, three new projects will start in 2024 in EOSC specifically addressing the topic of “Trusted environments for sensitive data management”. The results of these projects will also produce assets for the European HRIC.