AWS for the European Health Data Space (EHDS)

Healthcare organizations face significant challenges, including fragmented systems, limited interoperability of health data, and the need to enable citizen control over personal health data. Additionally, there is a need to foster a thriving digital health market and unlock the potential of health data. To address these challenges, the EHDS aims to establish a common framework and infrastructure for the use of health data for research, innovation, policy-making, and regulatory activities in the European Union (EU). It will also create common standards and practices enabling EU citizens to better access, control, and share their electronic personal health data.

The European Health Data Space (EHDS) will empower around 449 million EU citizens and institutions to harness the transformative and ethical potential of health data. This could advance care, research, and understanding of diseases and treatments. However, realizing this vision requires thoughtful policy frameworks, combined with cutting-edge technologies, to ensure the security, transparency, and user control of sensitive health data.

AWS, with over 240 fully featured services, is well-positioned to support the development of the EHDS. With 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic Regions (and more planned), AWS offers the infrastructure and capabilities needed to build secure, scalable, and compliant health data platforms.

AWS is committed to collaborating with customers to implement projects that will contribute to establishing a vibrant EHDS, one that sets global standards for the responsible use of sensitive data to improve people's lives.

To implement EHDS, healthcare organizations will need robust, scalable, and compliant technology solutions to build the underlying data platforms and meet EHDS requirements. AWS can provide much needed technical support.

Reach out to an AWS Partner for support to build your secured environment in alignment with EHDS.

Customers can work with AWS Healthcare Competency Partners to build innovative, cost-effective, and secure solutions that improve operational and clinical effectiveness, while improving patient outcomes for healthcare payers and providers. AWS Healthcare Competency Partners have demonstrated technical expertise and customer success in building healthcare solutions on AWS that securely store, process, transmit, and analyze clinical information.

Partners with the Security Competency have deep technical expertise with security in AWS and proven customer success in securing the cloud journey with their infrastructure, software and services offerings.

AWS Security Competency Partners specialize in delivering security-focused solutions for your specific workloads and use cases. AWS Partner solutions enable automation and agility and scaling with your workloads. You can easily find, buy, deploy, and manage these cloud-ready software solutions, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, in a matter of minutes from AWS Marketplace. These solutions work together to help secure your data in ways not possible on-premises, with solutions available for a wide range of workloads and use cases.

For the implementation of EHDS, healthcare organizations will need robust, scalable, and compliant technology solutions to build the underlying data platforms and meet EHDS requirements. This is where AWS can provide the needed technical support. Our proposal for the technical infrastructure for EHDS offers a cloud-based, collaborative framework for sharing health data across the EU. Key components include: decentralized data ownership, healthcare data products, self-service infrastructure components and federated data governance.

Inspired by the proposal of the joint action Towards the European Health Data Space (TEHDAS1), the following diagram and the blog post “Build secure and scalable data platforms for the European Health Data Space” proposes a high-level reference architecture for secondary usage of health data.