Scientific Stakeholders' Dialogues

PHIRI, the Population Health Information Research Infrastructure, organized a series of stakeholder dialogues on February 18th (10:00-12:00 CET), in order to bring together, interact and/or exchange with relevant national and international stakeholders while promoting active discussions around three themes that are at the core of the PHIRI project: FAIR catalogues for health data, building a federated architecture and crisis preparedness. Several stakeholders and key persons of other European projects joined the 3 different panel discussions, moderated by PHIRI work packages leads.                                            

                                             Main takeaways

FAIR catalogues on (population) health data

Moderator: Hanna Tolonen, THL Finland (PHIRI); Panellists: Henning Hermjakob, BY-COVID; Anastassja Sialm, SYNCHROS; Truls Korsgaard, Norwegian Directorate for e-Health

• Metadata on health information data sources is important for discoverability
• We need incentives for data owners to provide proper documentations
• The EHDS is taking the first steps through the HealthDCAT-AP
• We need to increase the knowledge capability and expertise on metadata expertise

Building a federated infrastructure

Moderator: Enrique Bernal-Delgado, IACS Spain (PHIRI); Panellists: Ernestina Menasalvas, UnCOver; Gergely Sipos, EGI-ACE; Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, ELIXIR-CONVERGE

• The challenges of a federated approach are both legal/cultural and technical: the data governance, trust and harmonising heterogeneous data sources
• However, for now, the federated approach (instead of a centralized setting) is still the solution for analysing sensitive health data
• Options for federated learning methodologies are still being researched

Crisis Preparedness

Moderator: Claudia Habl, GÖG Austria (PHIRI); Panellists: Chaim Rafalowski, NO FEAR; Sofia Tsekeridou, STAMINA; Claudia Houareau, PANDEM-2; Anikó Balogh, CO-VERSATILE; Luis Rodríguez, COVID-X

• Establishing cross-border exchanges of expertise and lessons learned in a secure environment was very important during the crisis; the projects have an important role as knowledge brokers.
• The challenges of being crisis-prepared is not only technical; the human resources are also important; workforce training and knowledge sharing can provide solutions.
• The PREPARE cluster can explore how they can complement each other’s work, especially in this post pandemic era, in order to help Europe to be more prepared for future crises.

Read the full report here. 

Read the live-tweet of the event here.