Dear all,
As you know, the new RDA Health Data Interest Group (HDIG) had its first meeting during P8, in Denver, on 17 September 2016.
That meeting focused on “Privacy & Security” and was really successful. You can find its minutes on our RDA HDIG webpage: https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/health-data.html.
As a follow up and in preparation of P9 in Barcelona in April 2017, it is now high time to join forces and animate our IG, starting from defining some appropriate topics for discussion in the forthcoming months.
As a first step, we suggest having one (or more) teleconference (TC), possibly clustering the group members according to time zone preferences by the third week of December (20th to 22nd December).
The Doodle poll to identity your preference is open until Friday 16th December in the following address: http://doodle.com/poll/6pr4uw47ctiawvnd.
Subsequent TCs will be planned for end-January and end-February 2017.
All those interested in being actively engaged in the IG and in planning its next session in Barcelona, as well as those just curious to know what kind of issues the Interest Group is dealing with, are warmly invited to express their preferences and hopefully attend.
In the initial HDIG Charter, some topics were identified as priorities but still need to be effectively discussed within the IG. In particular, the focus of HDIG includes the following areas:
• Privacy and Security in Health Data: sharing best practices on pseudonymisation, anonymisation, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and dedicated blockchain applications; developing models for dynamic consent that protect patients while enabling research; providing a forum for discussing, explaining and responding to data protection regulatory issues.
• Data based Healthcare for Personalised Medicine: analytics applied to highly sensitive health data; disease signature identification and stratification of patient groups; patient-specific simulation and prediction; exploring the potential of health data usage in in-silico drug development and clinical trials.
• Health Data Organisations environment: defining a list of organisations dealing with Health Data to cluster with; disseminating HDIG results within other relevant Health Data organisations.
What we would like to discuss in the forthcoming TC is which of these priorities to address first and put in our Agenda for P9 in Barcelona. Furthermore, we would like to discuss the type of activities that we could initiate on these topics. The following are some related ideas:
• Having thematic (physical or web) meetings on ongoing projects with experts in the relevant fields, to be promoted also through the RDA website (newsletters/articles and events)
• Defining user scenarios with other stakeholders and representatives from Health Data Organisations who might be involved in the next meeting
• Having joint meetings with related IGs/WGs in Barcelona and possibly establishing a particular WG on a more specific topic (e.g., Blockchain)
Finally, during the TC we would like to also engage in the following:
• Have all of us share our experiences in relevant projects that might be presented in Barcelona or during other thematic meetings
• Inform the HDIG about relevant Health Organisations we should liaise with
• Make suggestions for the agenda of the next TC, to be held in January or February 2017
Do feel free to submit additional topics of discussion for the upcoming TC and, please, do fill in the Doodle by Friday.
In due course, you will receive the details on how to connect to the TC.
Kind regards,
Anthony Chang Edwin Morley-Fletcher Yannis Ioannidis
—
Ludovica Durst, Ph. D.
***@***.***
Lynkeus S.r.l.
Via Livenza 6, 00198 Roma
Tel. +39 06 8440801
Fax +39 06 85344833