On January 16^th the Dutch – German Innovation and Technology pact organized an online meeting on digitalization and data sharing. One of the main outcomes was that participants, ranging from industry to government, agreed that data sharing and AI in the health sector have huge potential, especially when NL and GER work together. 

With the European Health Data Space the European Union is taking a big step into the direction of digitalization of health data and facilitating the exchange and access to health information. This data can further be used for artificial intelligence applications that advance medical research as well as innovative therapies and medicinal products.

To support these developments cross border collaboration is crucial and hence we will dive into the possibilities for Dutch-German collaboration on the topics of data sharing and infrastructure and its implementation for AI application and the regulatory frameworks that come with it.

We will have roughly 10 experts for each round table (half NL, half Ger) from government, public private initiatives, university clinics and private stakeholders. We invite everyone to attend both roundtables, as to achieve the maximum amount of cross over. We are also inviting companies and start-ups to pitch their specific solutions.

Round Table 1: in the morning we will discuss Software and Data Structuring (Meta-data catalogues and the European Health Data Space, how to deal with federated data as a consequence)

Round Table 2: the afternoon will be all about Implementation (Usage for AI and Regulatory Issues)

The topics of the round tables and leading questions:

1. Software: Meta-Data-Catalogue (challenges NL-Ger)

Metadata catalogues are increasingly popular, but do we make them truly useful for the research community? The right-level of detail is necessary to help researchers to understand the dataset content without revealing too much data on the basis of the metadata only. Easy functionality is important to access the dataset once it is found (e.g. in a webshop-like functionality). What are the metadata standards to secure interoperability across datasets and countries (NL-Ger)?

2. European Health Data Space

Actual development and implementation of technical components in NL/Ger: SPEs, dataset catalogue, and data access. Governance aspects: How will the HDAB be set up? Legal aspects: What will be regulated in the national implementation act for the EHDS? How can private parties use the EHDS services and how can academic parties access data held at private data holders?

3. Federation of Data (How to organize it locally?)

As a consequence, data will be federated: How can we secure that all parties actually participate in the national network? How can large scale use of the data be organized e.g. for AI development. How do we ensure the correct usage of data standards? How is the security organized, in particular also when you want to support federated analyses?

4. AI Infrastructure (getting it to the patient, local calibration/validation of algorithms -> like app store for health algorithms)

What data infrastructure is available for large-scale AI development using health data? What standardization is ongoing to allow easy implementation of AI algorithms in the local data infrastructure of hospitals? How is AI development integrated in the EHDS infrastructure? Are there cloud services connected to the SPE? What regulatory sandbox-initiatives are there, also to support the MDR and AI-act for AI -development?

Interested/ Participating Stakeholders so far:

• Health RI
• HINL
• AI Coalition 4 NL
• TNO
• Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands
• Topsector ICT Netherlands
• Topsector LSH Netherlands
• University Medical Centre Utrecht
• University Medical Centre Groningen
• NFU (Dutch Federation of University Clinics)
• CumuluZ iniciative
• Oncode Accelerator
• BDI
• Roche Germany
• SphinX Iniciative
• DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center)
• BioM
• Merantix Momentum

& more to come