What you need to know about health data warehouses 

By selecting the 16 winners of its call for projects, France 2030 is highlighting the importance of health data warehouses (HDWs) for research and medical innovation. Here we take a closer look at the issues and challenges they face.  

What is a health data warehouse?  

The health data warehouse is an essential tool in the medical field, designed to facilitate access to centralised data and guarantee respect for patient privacy. 

Each healthcare professional uses dedicated business software that partially isolates data, ensuring that only information relevant to their practice is accessible. The EDS makes it possible to centralise data from these various business applications within a single database. Its primary objective is to provide fast, efficient access to the information that is crucial to healthcare professionals, offering a complete, integrated view of the data for an individual or group of individuals. 

EDS also ensures the confidentiality and security of data in accordance with current standards and regulations, such as the European RGPD and health information security standards. As part of its dedicated call for projects, France 2030 required the use of qualified cloud hosting. SecNumCloud.

There are three key stages in creating an EDS: 

• Collecting heterogeneous data from different information systems, with interoperability constraints, 
• Standardisation and pseudonymisation of data to make it usable, 
• The choice of data storage model to facilitate use and guarantee confidentiality. 

The challenges of EDS  

Above all, DHSs help to improve care pathways and hospital management. By centralising information, healthcare professionals can more easily monitor and analyse the prevalence of disease. This makes it possible to anticipate and optimise the use of resources, and ultimately to achieve better results for patients. These human challenges are linked to economic ones. A better cared-for patient is one who is discharged more quickly and for longer. The cost of material resources is also reduced when they are optimised. 

DHSs also allow secondary use of health data for clinical research. Data from French patients is particularly valuable and qualitative in this context, as the French healthcare system is highly centralised. Used outside their care pathways, patient data feeds into studies and algorithms to develop new treatments or protocols. 

The potential gains from the proper use of health data are therefore high, and the economic stakes are high, since by 2022 the consumption of healthcare and medical goods in France had risen to 235.8 billion euros*. 

The challenges of DHS  

While the issues surrounding DHS are numerous, the challenges are colossal. First and foremost, funding is a critical issue. A health data warehouse is a long-term project. Between data collection, standardisation, storage and operational maintenance, costs can quickly become high and increase as the project progresses. The dedicated call for projects as part of France 2030 has enabled the winning programmes to obtain funding of up to €75 million, which is needed to cover these costs and create a high-quality database.

To guarantee their effectiveness in terms of security and accessibility, EDSs need to be modernised in order to remain operational. To achieve this, organisations can migrate their EDS to the cloud. As well as reducing costs, the scalability and availability of the cloud are assets that help to keep the platform running smoothly. Collaboration and integration with other services and applications are also facilitated by the cloud.

Finally, such a sensitive database requires extra attention in terms of security. Protecting health data deserves the highest security standards on the market. Hosting data in the cloud HDS certified and qualified SecNumCloud is the solution put forward by France 2030 and the one preferred by industry professionals. 

*Source: Drees