Relevant and qualitative data is an indispensable and essential element to build worthwhile classic and generative artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes referred to as big data. Health care data, not only produced within UMC Utrecht, but from the whole of the Utrecht region, is big data.
UMC Utrecht is instigator of one of the eight regional nodes in the Netherlands, named Health Data Space Utrecht (HDSU), that together comprise the national Health-RI initiative. Based on the EHDS-regulation, this initiative is working to make all healthcare data in the Utrecht region reusable and available to build a learning health care system. Through the increasing possibilities scientific research can be stretched in areas that are currently not easily available. For example, HDSU will make it possible to observe patient journeys through the Dutch health care system, possibly resulting in advanced prevention interventions or a better understanding of the long-term efficacy, side-effects, life expectancy and quality-of-life of medical interventions. AI will play a prominent and progressive role in building this learning
health care system.
The regional multidisciplinary team, building the HDSU, works in close collaboration with Health-RI, the other regional nodes and the vast amount of health care providers in the region. The team focusses on four aspects of a health data space: (1) building a regional catalogue that informs researchers and innovators which data is available; (2) make health care data from different health care providers combined available for scientific research and AI-solutions; (3) build a sophisticated data explorer that makes horizontal and vertical portioned analysis possible and (4) build the infrastructure to support this.
