Interoperability for EU DSM: Implementation of CEF building blocks in the Smart4Health project - success stories and lessons learned

Abstract

The Smart4Health (S4H) software application will enable European Union (EU) citizens to manage, analyse, and exchange their aggregated electronic health data. This citizen-centred EU electronic health record (EHR) exchange approach for personalised health services will be the first step for the provision of citizen-centred solutions and services in a digital single market for wellbeing and healthcare. Establishing interoperability between the diverse EU EHR data and citizen-generated health data is mandatory to guarantee adequate usability, reliability, and trust of the service. The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) building blocks address/fulfil such aspects while complying with EU regulations. Here we demonstrate the current status and applicability of the CEF building blocks in the digital health environment for the envisioned S4H software application. The major findings and success stories resulted from the S4H Project are as follows: (1) a secure and user-friendly eID service for the EU-wide Smart4Health community was successfully integrated into the Smart4Health platform, whereby 7 out of the 13 supported EU Member States are already connected, (2) the eTranslation service was compared to other popular alternatives on the market with the result that eTranslation is a secure and valid tool to address multi-language challenges and (3) we identified several use cases for which Smart4Health can benefit from the usage of CEF building blocks, including the improvement of data quality and increase of trust in data sharing.