The use of data for public health and healthcare-a shared goal of the EU member states

Population health - understood both as prevention and healthcare - needs good data. Data can support decision making on the system level as well as the delivery of services for each individual. Furthermore, data are a prerequisite for research and innovation. At the same time, health data are hard to come by: coverage is spotty or - for certain parts of the system - lacking, available data only provides a proxy view of actual prevention or healthcare, or it exists in formats that hamper or prevent automated processing at scale. Furthermore, the high sensitivity of health data necessitates an equally high degree of protection, further complicating access. These challenges are not specific to Germany but are common in all member states of the European Union. However, up to now, German stakeholders tend to neglect the potential of a joint European approach to these challenges. The article provides an overview of different European initiatives in the domain of health data. The focus is on how German stakeholders can gain better access to these initiatives to benefit from the knowledge and experiences of neighbouring countries, but also to feed back their own knowledge into the European loop.