A newly-released report by Science Europe’s Scientific Committee for Medical Sciences makes a number of recommendations on the topic of ‘How to Transform Big Data into Better Health: Envisioning a Health Big Data Ecosystem for Advancing Biomedical Research and Improving Health Outcomes in Europe’.

The report - which consolidates the outcomes of a two day workshop co-hosted with the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) on 24 and 25 November 2015 at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in Erice, Italy – identifies and acknowledges the challenges in achieving the stated objective and makes a number of key recommendations.

Fundamental to the argument is that tackling big health challenges in Europe demands a ‘Big Science’ approach that integrates multi-layered health information called ‘Big Data’ into a highly elaborate ecosystem. This requires: facilitation of the collection and integration of data related to the health status of individuals (from genomics to lifestyle and environment); facilitation of the transformation of Big Data into knowledge; and the development of a permissive and conducive health Big Data ecosystem in Europe that supports a multi-disciplinary approach and a culture of data sharing.

To achieve success, efforts must be co-ordinated at five levels: scientific, with the development of new mathematical modelling and simulation approaches of biology, a conceptual framework for system biology and ways to separate relevant from meaningless data; legal, with a Data Protection Regulation that supports data sharing while protecting personal data; societal, increasing citizens’ involvement in the management of their own health data; organisational, developing codes of conduct and research practices to ensure good quality data, as well as new funding schemes and mechanisms for data sharing by individual researchers; and investigator, developing pilot experiments to showcase evidence-based benefits of sharing data for researchers.

By releasing this report, the Committee hopes to bring a novel scientific perspective on how to unlock the immense added value in the wealth of health-related Big Data that are available, with the aim of improving the health of the European population.

The full report can be downloaded at:

http://www.scienceeurope.org/urls/bigdata1