ISGlobal Supports the Reuse of Health Data to Facilitate Research

Together with 37 other researchers from the main biomedical research centres in Catalonia, the director of ISGlobal, Antoni Plasència, and the director of its allied research centre CREAL, Josep M. Antó, have signed a statement entitled "Data reuse for research in the healthcare sciences", which expresses their support for the reuse of anonymised health data for the purposes of research and analysis.

In the view of the signatories of the statement, the controlled release of data sets from the Catalan health system for use in research and analysis would provide valuable information about disease, increase the quality of the health care received by the population, and improve the evaluation of public policies. They also stressed the need to apply all the standard ethical principles to such research and to protect patient privacy and guarantee the security of the data.  They believe that making anonymised health data available to research centres specialised in the health sciences could lead to a quantitative and qualitative leap forward in research in Catalonia, making it much more effective and efficient.

Consequently,  the main research centres in Catalonia support the Catalan Ministry of Health's VISC+ project aimed at making anonymised and secure Catalan health data available to promote and facilitate research, innovation and analysis in medicine and the health sciences.

The complete statement (in Catalan) is available here