Health Sense

Project facts

Project promoter:
Ministry of Social Affairs - Estonia(EE)
Project Number:
EE-INNOVATION-0002
Status:
Completed
Final project cost:
€1,682,612
Donor Project Partners:
Helse West ICT(NO)
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences(NO)
Other Project Partners
Health and Welfare Information Systems Center(EE)
Tallinn University of Technology(EE)
University of Tartu(EE)
Programme:

Description

Project aims to develop a HealthSense platform, which is a virtual environment collecting health, health cycle and lifestyle data for research and service development purposes. This is done for enhancing the creation of new products, services and solutions by the private sector, novel interventions by the public sector and relevant scientific knowledge by the R&D communities in order to raise life expectancy and prolong healthy life years of people. In addition, it will provide a toolbox that enables the creation of data analysis-based solutions for prolonging a healthy human life. As the data handled in the environment is sensitive, the tools for safe collection, storage, access and processing of data are an essential part of the provided toolbox. A secure data storage, integration, access and analysis toolkit will be developed to provide large, complex and detailed sets of health and lifecycle data for the public sector, private sector and R&D institutions. Project activities closely follow all aspects stated in the European General Data Protection Regulation.

Summary of project results

Project addressed the data processing tools in the national Health information system as its main challenge. Interest of people in using their health data is increasing, but releasing such sensitive data is a time-consuming process. With the HealthSense toolkit, it is possible to process data from any other field with the created tools, and it is free to install and use for anyone.

Project activities concentrated in improving the process of preparing anonymised and pseudonymous data flows and thus their availability in order to foster the development of new products, services and solutions in the private sector and to support innovative public sector approaches to health management by linking them to R&D knowledge. To this end, a set of tools were created that can be set up and also set up for the data itself, which will enable the desired data to be issued to the applicant.

The main focus was on developing a pseudonymization tool, which replaces data presented as a closed list (personal identification code, nationality, religion, medicine, diagnosis, document number) with a code that is different for the same value of the data element. The codes are not repeatable outside the system. The pseudonym also allows to aggregate pseudonymous data from different databases and data owners in a pseudonymous form. The pseudonym''s solution consists of administrative interface: data obfuscator, which allows specific data to be made more general (i.e. the date can be used to make a period, year or month number, the address can be left in the settlement, county or country, the hierarchical classification can be moved up one level by level, etc); text organiser, which searches the text for meaningful information (medications, diagnoses, names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, dates) and unpacks them into data fields. The purpose of the deserialiser and serialiser is to structure the document-based data entity of the Health Information System in the form of a relational database, which enables later data to be processed more easily and faster according to the required data query data counters. 

Project achieved the completion of all planned activities and resulted with tools that eases and makes it faster to release pseudonymized, blurred, and aggregated data that can be considered open data. This means that individuals are not identifiable and do not have to go through a long chain of coordination to obtain data.

Summary of bilateral results

The partnership can be considered effective. Although there were not many physical meetings between the donor partners, the cooperation can be considered consistent and good due to the exchange of knowledge and experience and the constant flow of information.

Information on the projects funded by the EEA and Norway Grants is provided by the Programme and Fund Operators in the Beneficiary States, who are responsible for the completeness and accuracy of this information.