Abstract: Health systems are under major pressures to improve health outcomes, deliver more equitable health services and improve their resilience against future possible threats whilst facing a growing burden of long-term conditions and multi-morbidity in an ageing society. Health systems transformation is vital, and this requires much more evidence of current quality of care, insight into unmet health needs and  accelerated research and innovation. Europe therefore faces an urgent need to scale up its capability to learn from health data. There are many projects that are establishing big data platforms and learning health ecosystems for this. However, Europe is now excited at the prospect of major investments through the European Commission and Member States in a European Health Data Space. This presentation will begin by illustrating the urgency for learning from big health data, and showcase some of the example projects that are making progress towards this. The European Health Data Space itself will be explained, with its plans for improving the safety and continuity of care as patients travel around Europe, and for making data sets more widely available for research and public health intelligence. The outstanding health informatics grand challenges will be outlined, with particular emphasis on data quality and public trust.

About the speaker: Professor Dipak Kalra is a leading expert in health informatics and the President of the European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD). He studied medicine at Guy's Hospital in London, specializing in General Practice, and worked as a GP for a decade before transitioning into health informatics. Kalra earned his PhD in Health Informatics in 2003 and is a Fellow of both the Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Computer Society.

Kalra has significantly contributed to the development of international standards, including ISO, CEN, and HL7, focusing on electronic health records (EHR), interoperability, and data privacy. He was a founding Director of the openEHR Foundation, which promotes open specifications for health information systems. He has led multiple European projects, including Horizon 2020 and the IMI programme, collaborating with pharma companies, hospitals, and ICT organizations.

Dipak Kalra is a Professor of Health Informatics at University College London and a Visiting Professor at Ghent University, continuing to advance health data innovation and quality.

N.B.: Prof. Dipak Kalra is also an opponent of Igor Bossenko's PhD thesis "A domain-specific framework for supporting semantic interoperability in primary and secondary use of health data on the example of the Estonian National Health Information System", and will participate in the thesis defence as a member of the defence committee. The defence will take place on February 11, 2025 starting at 15:00 in room U05-103 (Educational Building of TalTech, Ehitajate tee 5, Tallinn) and will be accessible via Zoom.