On February 15 and 16, the Spanish Health IT Society (SEIS) posted the 20th edition of the Health Data and Protection Security Forum where GMV’s data scientist, Pablo Gonzalez, gave a talk on the company’s proposal for federalized research with health data as part of the National Health Data Space, Using the Tool Developed by the Company, uTile.

According to Gonzalez, from a technological standpoint, “the Spanish and European Health Data Spaces will represent significant challenges when defining a federalized governance model that is sufficiently flexible to meet all the requirements and preferences of the communities and member states.” In his opinion, “ this governance will be much more simple if we harmonize the health data sets using a common data model like OMOP.” This approach will also have “many more advantages when implementing the use cases, as we will need to go a step beyond interoperability and start talking about semantics.”

The need to speed up and facilitate the approval process of research projects by ethics committees was brought up at the discussion table. As GMV's data scientist pointed out, “better compliance training for technical teams and technology training for DPOs will be needed.” At the same time, he said, “our suggestion is that privacy enhancing technologies can help overcome these barriers, as we are exploring in the TARTAGLIA project.”

It bears noting that GMV designed uTile PET, a solution for secure and private calculations on distributed data, without exposing or moving them from the organizations. This solution leverages confidential data to improve machine learning algorithms and analytical models, complying at all times with organizational requirements to guarantee the privacy of the data, as well as applicable legislation.