Digital innovation can be an opportunity to improve people’s health and with that vision EFA has participated in the European public consultation about ‘Transformation Health and Care in the Digital Single Market’, with our views on how to address the systemic challenges digital innovation brings to health and care.
For example, on the management of personal health data, we claimed that patients must own their data and should be able to access and manage them if they so wish. Besides, we pointed out that reuse of patients’ data can be very helpful for research and treatments but only if that reuse is done after the provision of clear information for patients on how and for which purposes their health data will be shared and reused. The consent could also be flexible.
Personalised medicine was another topic addressed by the consultation. In the past decade, we have seen the development of digital tools with huge potential benefits for research, prevention and personalised medicine and self-management. However, their application in these sectors remains low while many actions should be taken to enable it, from the development of standards to ensure the validity and reliability of health data processed by apps, to the compatibility of different platforms for data collection, and more importantly,to raise awareness on the benefits of digital tools, or apps to enlarge its use by patients, researchers and healthcare professionals.
At EFA we represent patients and voice their needs and views, thus we defend that patients’ feedback is key to improve health and care services. Not only it is important to enable this feedback process between patients and professionals, but also to provide support for knowledge transfer between member states and regions, to support regions and municipalities in rolling out new services and to support EU associations of patients and clinicians to improve clinical practices.
Read all our suggestions here
If you want to know about other European Commision's consultations, follow the link: https://ec.europa.eu/info/consultations_en
Learn more about our activity: http://www.efanet.org/component/customproperties/tag/23?Itemid=118