Collaborating for Digital Health and Care in Europe

The virtual workshop in a nutshell

This Virtual Workshop explored how ecosystems’ governance at the country level can boost progress in data sharing. If offered a view on sustaining health data ecosystems over time and in the same time making them open to new sources of health data and digital health innovations. It included two case studies from Israel and Scotland on governance and sustainability and offered plenty of space for debate. 

No time to watch the webinar now? Explore the outcomes

Tino Marti opened the discussion by introducing the outcomes of the previous workshops and the related factsheet. He then passed the floor to Nessa Barry (Scottish Government).

Ms Barry delivered a presentation on the Scottish health data ecosystem as an example of top-down ecosystem. She showed its governance features and the Scottish digital health and care strategy and programme for 2020-2021.

This was followed by Rachelle Kaye's presentation on Israel’s health data ecosystem​ (which uses a bottom-up approach). Ms Kaye introduced its context, governance principles, and ongoing management. She also illustrated data ecosystems through the evolution of Maccabi's Health Data Ecosystem​. ​She explained the need to ensure sustainability and change the semantics of communication on digital health and patient care towards greater commitment. ("from engagement to marriage, from empowerment to partnership").

In the last part of the workshop, EHTEL hosted a “front row” with the guests Meghan Bradway (Norwegian Centre for eHealth Research), Margaret Whoriskey and Donna Henderson (Scottish Government), Ron Reut (Assuta Medical Centers), and Zhaklina Chagoroska (eHealth Directorate, Ministry of Health North Macedonia).

The interactive part of the workshop then began. Thanks to the tool Mentimeter, the audience members answered a number of key questions. One was "how important is for person-centered care to increase the flow of data generate by patients?".

We encourage you to see all the poll questions and results by watching the last 20 minutes of the video, from (time) 01.08.00 onwards.

The final key messages

• "Permanent white water": organisational principles to deal with a new reality (that is both agile and disruptive) 
• Both bottom-up and top-down approaches agree on governance principles for sustainability:

- Collaboration between the players at the top and bottom is crucial
- From stakeholder engagement to marriage (by growing commitment) 

• Knowledge and information sharing is as important as data sharing