Integrating healthcare data for enhanced citizen-centred care and analytics

Abstract

The potential of healthcare systems worldwide is expanding as new medical devices and data sources are regularly presented to healthcare providers which could be used to personalise, improve and revise treatments further. However, there is presently a large gap between the data collected, the systems that store the data, and any ability to perform big data analytics to combinations of such data. This paper suggests a novel approach to integrate data from multiple sources and formats, by providing a uniform structure to the data in a healthcare data lake with multiple zones reflecting how refined the data is: from raw to curated when ready to be consumed or used for analysis. The integration further requires solutions that can be proven to be secure, such as patient-centric data sharing agreements (smart contracts) on a blockchain, and novel privacy-preserving methods for extracting metadata from data sources, originally derived from partially-structured or from completely unstructured data. Work presented here is being developed as part of an EU project with the ultimate aim to develop solutions for integrating healthcare data for enhanced citizen-centred care and analytics across Europe.