The Health, Law and Technology (HELT) Symposium 2023

Description

Our increasingly digitised and connected society is driving the transformation of the health sector and the individual experiences and perceptions of healthcare. Increases in the ability to share data, in computing power and the ability to apply ever more complex forms of processing to health data are changing our very understanding of what health data is and how it should be used. Trends that wereconsidered aspirational or futuristic such as remote healthcare, personalised medicine, AI-based medical devices and big data health research are becoming entrenched.Technological change means that everyday more health data is being generated and stored. Demand for health data for scientific research is also rapidly increasing.

Health data governance is becoming a special case in the landscape of EU data policy and data protection legal framework. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) already sets out extra constraints on the processing of healthdata as ‘special categories of personal data’ and importantly many Member States have availed themselves of the discretion to granted by the GDPR to introduce further conditions for processing health data. This has led to a continued fragmentation in terms of the regulatory picture. Efforts can be seen from the European Union to remove the barriers to the free flow of health data and thus unleash its potential. This includes a proposal of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) in May 2022 as the first sectorial legislation for data governance, aiming to enhance individual control of their health data and build an effective mechanism for accessing health data for innovation, research and policymaking.

The first HELT (HEalth, Law, and Technology) symposium in 2023 will centre around the notion of ‘health data sharing in an interconnected society’. The symposium will be organised under the auspices of Health & Ageing Law Lab (HALL). HALL is located at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Our goal is to generate conversations between different stakeholders, including policy makers, academics, regulators, healthcare professionals, scientific researchers and data subjects on the challenges of sharing of health data and the potential impact initiatives such as the proposed European Health Data Space will create.

Period	26 Apr 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Brussels , Belgium
Degree of Recognition	International