About this Research Topic

Background

Technology is a key driver for innovation in the medical and the health sectors at large. Data-intensive applications and services can provide better and more cost-efficient solutions with high impact for improved point-of-care solutions, integrating health data from different sources, tailored to the specific health care needs of the individual, thus helping to achieve better patient management and improved clinical outcomes.

In Europe, the relatively recent proposal for a regulation to set up the European Health Data Space - aiming to unleash the full potential of health data - will open new opportunities for synergies and value co-creation as part of high-performance stakeholder-driven ecosystems, while also ensuring citizens to take control of their own health data. With regard to this special Research Topic, we consider health data spaces as cross-institutional organizational and technical solutions for safe and secure health data exchange between different stakeholders for better health care and research.

Disruptive technologies such as distributed analytics, federated learning and online algorithms offer unprecedented opportunities for a successful digital transformation of the health care. Unlocking this potential will depend on the capacity to collect, integrate, and interpret large amounts of multi-modal data, as well as to ensure compliance with existing as well as emerging regulatory frameworks and infrastructures that will both promote the development of impactful solutions.

This Research Topic aims to offer prospective authors (researchers, academics, health policymakers, practitioners, and others) to submit original contributions covering work related to tools, technologies, and digital solutions demonstrating the use of health data for better healthcare delivery and health-data exchange, taking into account effectiveness and efficiency, but also ethical and legal aspects.

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to at least one of the topics below. All article types are accepted, including reviews.

• Transparency and access to health data (including electronic health records)
• Different stakeholders’ perspectives on the exploitation of Health Data Spaces
• New approaches and methods for improving FAIR and high-quality data, and enabling reproducible and privacy-preserved analysis
• Role of standards and standards deployment for enabling Health Data Spaces
• AI and machine learning-based medical applications within Health Data Spaces
• Use cases for translation and impact of AI in medical practice
• Integrated Care and Chronic Disease Management Solutions
• Clinical decision support systems for healthcare professionals and patients
• Patient Empowerment and Patient-Doctor relationships
• Privacy and information security in medical practice and research
• Pilot implementations for the European Health Data Space and similar solutions
• The impact of technology usage on the well-being of individual patients and patient groups
• Design, implementation and scaling up of digital solutions and e-Health services
• Ethical, legal and social aspects and gender perspectives
• Technology acceptance and adoption

Keywords: eHealth, access to health data, health data reuse, health data spaces, FAIR data principles, trustworthy AI, data analytics, distributed learning, access to sensitive personal data, electronic consent management, scalability of data management resources

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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