The European FAIR4Health Project ends to promote and facilitate the exchange and responsible use of health data based on the FAIR principles

The EpiChron Group of IACS and IIS Aragón has been part of the FAIR4Health project of the European Commission with the aim of developing tools that facilitate the reuse of health research data in accordance with the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data) .

During its 36 months of execution, FAIR4Health has developed two advanced technological applications, one aimed at facilitating the integration of health data from different sources (Data Curation Tool), and another to face the challenge of ensuring data privacy (Data Privacy Tool). Likewise, the developed work platform (FAIR4Health Platform) is intuitive, aimed at end users and allows analysis models to be carried out in a distributed way on previously FAIRified data sets (FAIR4Health Platform). These tools are also open source, so they will be available to the scientific community once the project is completed.

The validation of these tools has been carried out through two clinical cases based on real-life data from the health systems of 5 European countries (Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal and Serbia): The first case has allowed the identification of multimorbidity patterns. clinically consistent and with a significant impact on mortality and cognitive impairment in older people. The second has allowed the development of a clinical decision-making support tool, which has been shown to have a predictive capacity of 78% on the risk of hospital readmission in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

FAIR4Health, aimed at promoting and facilitating the use of FAIR data, has ultimately demonstrated the potential positive impact of the use of this type of tools, both for the scientific and clinical-care community, since: 1) It allows increasing heterogeneity and size of the databases used in research, resulting in greater relevance and validity of the results obtained; 2) Increases security in the reuse of clinical data, guaranteeing compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation and facilitating the use of models that ensure privacy; and 3)Reduces the time spent collecting data for research.

The FAIR4Health consortium is made up of 17 partners from 11 countries: Andalusian Health Service; Aragonese Institute of Health Sciences; Carlos III University; Atos Spain SA; University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Austria; HL7 Foundation, Belgium; Institut für Medizinische Informatik, Statistik und Epidemiologie, Universität Leipzig KöR, Germany; Academic Medical Center of University of Amsterdam; University of Geneva, Switzerland; Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, University of Braunschweig, Germany; Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy; European Federation of Medical Informatics, Switzerland; Digital Curation Center from University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Garrigues, Spain; Software Research and Development Consultancy, Turkey; University of Porto, Portugal; and Institute of Pulmonary Diseases of Vojvodine, Serbia.

All information on the FAIR4Health project is available on the social media profiles @Fair4Health and on the website https://www.fair4health.eu/.

FAIR4Health is a project funded by the call Science with and for Society (SwafS-04-2018) from the H2020 call of the European Commission under grant agreement number 824666.