The Health-RI proposal

The Dutch Ministries of EZK, OCW and VWS have submitted a proposal to the Cabinet for building an integrated health data infrastructure. This should make data related to welfare, health and care accessible for research, innovation and policy development. All this while safeguarding the privacy of those involved.

Together, the ministries have found a number of obstacles to these goals. The Health-RI proposal should remove these obstacles and further create a basis for the reuse of healthcare data. In doing so, the infrastructure must be designed to process the data in a secure and standardized manner so that it can be accessed by researchers, healthcare professionals and companies in a privacy-friendly manner.

The proposal is built on a number of principles, such as barrier-free access and inclusivity, and it also pays close attention to the obstacles. These are broken down into four components:

1. Findable: Healthcare data must become findable and must be able to be summarised.
2. Accessible: Data must be accessible to researchers and companies, and must also be protected within legal frameworks. Patients must furthermore be informed about what exactly constitutes access.
3. Linkable: The data must be structured, and different data sets must be linkable.
4. Reusable: The data must be documented and lawfully usable.