Health democratization

This project is about reinforcing the health data infrastructure in mobility and assurance through data democratization. Health data has immense scientific, societal, and commercial value. Sharing health data creates value for clinical care, trials, and case studies, as well as improving the knowledge base for healthcare researchers and organizations. 

Patients may also want to control and share their data for their own interests such as monitoring their health status, independent health data analysis, or sharing their health experiences in a patient community. These activities, however, can lead to cyber-attacks on the health data and provide a target for black market uses. Therefore, sharing and using health data poses legal, ethical, privacy, and technical challenges that limit the patient’s ability to control and share their data. This is a deficiency in the current health data infrastructure for secure data sharing and trust management.  

Configuring health data rights

The project aims to define, architect, implement, and evaluate a democratic health data infrastructure that will provide incentives to all parties – including individuals – to prove, negotiate, and configure their rights associated with health data. Conflicts of interest among different parties will be reconciled through a set of automated mechanisms so that data can move safely across trust boundaries. 

The project will contribute to the national health data infrastructure via the collaboration with the national project Helseanalyseplattformen – ehelse. 

NR’s role in the project is to design and implement a multiagent infrastructure for a healthcare domain. The software agents will run and negotiate decisions about sharing the health data. Agent requirements will be developed in compliance with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and healthcare regulations. The agents will represent software, applications, and human beings. Trust, tactics, strategies, conflict style, and negotiation style are included in the agents’ design.