The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD) hosted its 10th anniversary edition of their Annual Conference, “A Decade of Joining the Dots – Towards Bridging Data Spaces”, on December 3-4, in Ghent, Belgium. The Conference focused on three main topics:
- Maximising value from the European EHR exchange format
- The future of Health Data Spaces
- Adoption of Health Innovation
These two intense days were enriched by a pre-conference tutorial on health data quality and the first-ever conference from i~HD’s eSource Task Force: “Scaling eSource Now: Building the Future of Real-Time Clinical Data”.
This conference gathered policymakers, researchers, clinicians, innovators and patient representatives, all working together to shape the future of health data in Europe, responsibly and inclusively.
Main takeaways:
The 10th i~HD Annual Conference reinforced the critical role of high-quality, ethically managed health data in driving innovation, a message further strengthened by the rich programme of plenaries and parallel sessions exploring the European Health Data Space (EHDS), innovative EU-funded projects, and real-world use cases. For EPTRI, the key message was that patients-focused data is essential to developing better treatments, supporting research, and improving outcomes for patients, especially for children and young patients across Europe, while ensuring that patient needs, expectations, and values guide the development of future AI solutions as true co-designers.
These reflections directly resonate with the work currently underway within EPTRI’s Thematic Research Platform on Paediatric Health Data Services, which focuses on consolidating high-quality paediatric datasets, improving interoperability, and shaping secure and ethical data-sharing services tailored to children and young people. This work supports the standardisation of paediatric data and the alignment with the emerging EHDS architecture, helping ensure that children remain fully included in Europe’s evolving, patient-centred digital transformation of health.