The intelligent use of health data for personalised and predictive medicine.
The main objective of implementing an Electronic Health Record (EHR) is to improve the sharing and management of patients’ health-related information. However, being a rich set of information about patients and their health experiences, EHRs are increasingly used for secondary purposes. The application of big data technologies to information collected in routine medical care, aims to discover patterns and associations to identify and guide through expected as well as unexpected occurrences in healthcare practice.
After a successful pilot phase, Agence eSanté – Luxembourg’s national eHealth competence centre – carried out, in 2020, the general roll-out of its EHR, the DSP (Dossier de Soins Partagé), to all residents and cross-border workers affiliated to the national social security system. Agence eSanté has since observed a high adoption rate of the DSP. To date, Luxembourg counts more than 1 million DSPs containing around 8 million documents, with around 70% of DSPs having at least one document.
Since 2020, the number of documents in the DSPs is increasing significantly. This requires the development of a strategy that includes the implementation of innovative infrastructures to use health data. For this reason, Agence eSanté has decided to disrupt the idea of the DSP as being “solely” a secure space for health data and taken the challenge to transform it into a “smartDSP” by adding a Data Lake bringing intelligence to it in a GDPR compliant way.
Why a Data Lake for the “smartDSP”?
In 2021, Agence eSanté introduced a Data Lake as an additional urbanised component of the eSanté platform. The implementation of a Data Lake sets itself the objective of an intelligent use of health data in line with the primary scope of the DSP, to support standard medical routine as well as complex chronic diseases management.
The constitution of a Data Lake, respecting the confidentiality of patients’ data and based on BigData technologies, would make it possible to carry out “machine learning” type analyses. The contribution and use of AI-type technologies could position Luxembourg as a major player in personalised and predictive medicine. The application of big data analytics to the DSP aims at extracting and training rules and patterns relevant to the DSP’s medical routine data.
After this first population behavioural study, Agence eSanté aims at injecting this intelligence in the DSP, thus transforming it into the “smart DSP”. The “smart DSP” aims at supporting data-driven diagnosis and follow up of complex/chronic diseases. Thanks to the help of the international scientific community, a special attention will be on reducing detection time and improving the treatment of complex and/or rare diseases.
More information about Agence eSanté and its electronic health services on www.esante.lu/en
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.
