Catalonia creates ODAS, a portal for using health data in research

ODAS, the new Health Data Access Agency, will decide who can use the health information of Catalans for research purposes. The data will remain anonymised and encrypted.

The ODAS project, which stands for Health Data Access Agency, aims to open up citizens' health data for research while ensuring privacy. According to cope.es, the initiative is managed by the Agency for Quality and Health Evaluation of Catalonia (AQuAS).

This is explained by Xavier García, CEO of BetterCare, a company specialised in clinical interoperability. According to him, ODAS will function as a single point where it will be decided who can use these data, which must arrive anonymised and under maximum security.

García insists that health information has a scope that goes beyond its initial use, making it essential to guarantee privacy. For him, the citizen's trust weighs as much as the rigor of the studies conducted with those records.

“Data, if it doesn’t move, is useless”

In the executive's opinion, an isolated record of a patient contributes very little, while aggregated analysis allows for further research. Therefore, the system must facilitate the circulation of information.

In the first phase, the project will focus on clinical history: type of population, previous pathologies, and medications used. After that, the intention is to incorporate monitoring data, such as vital signs, which are especially useful in critical patients.

In light of the risk of cyberattacks, García explains that the technology is installed within each client's infrastructure. He cites the Aragonese Health Service as an example: the software would be hosted on its own servers, within its security environment.

Moreover, all data is encrypted, so that if someone were to breach the system, the information would not be directly readable or usable. The CEO claims this prevents recovery and fraudulent use.

With high-quality data, predictive models could be developed to track patient evolution or anticipate healthcare resource needs in the coming weeks. García acknowledges they are in a very early phase and cites as an example detecting a cardiac pathology from an electrocardiogram.

The main challenge, according to the CEO, is that data capture must be automatic at the source and reliable. The connected devices used by a large part of the population could help detect changes in the patient's physiology.

The information does not specify timelines for researchers to access ODAS, so the schedule will depend on the phases announced by AQuAS.