Ministry of Health presents program so researchers can use data from all public centers
<p>The initiative will allow for more scientific research to be done more quickly, at a lower cost and with more patients involved</p>
The Catalan Ministry of Health has launched a program to give researchers in the Catalan healthcare system and universities access to health data from patients cared for in public healthcare centers in Catalonia to use in specific studies.
This public program for the mass transfer personal data will replace previous similar initiatives, such as Visc+, and has received the technical, scientific, ethical and political approval required by Parliament.
The project, which will be led and managed by AQuAS under the Ministry of Health, incorporates all of the healthcare data generated by SISCAT (with nearly 7.5 million users). Once it has been anonymized and deidentified, the information will be made available to researchers at CERCA accredited research centers, SISCAT agents, public university research centers and the healthcare administration. Private research centers and for-profit business structures will not have access to the data.
This program, the Public Program for Data Analysis and Research and Innovation in Health, known as PADRIS for its initials in Catalan, is different in that it allows researchers to cross reference immense amounts of metric data from different hospitals (not only data from the center where the researcher works, as was previously the case).
The project aims to help improve the international positioning of Catalonia in the field of scientific research. The data researchers will be able to manage, reuse and analyze will help them do more research, more quickly, at a lower cost and with more patients involved. It could make it possible to do studies on monitoring and follow-up for recently introduced drugs, devices and medical implants, as well as analyzing why specific populations fall ill.
PADRIS is joining the PERIS plan, passed in July 2016, to generate new knowledge to fight disease and provide better healthcare.
More information on the PADRIS program (in Catalan).