Background: Centralized collection and processing of healthcare data across national borders pose significant challenges, including privacy concerns, data heterogeneity and legal barriers. To address some of these challenges, we formed an interdisciplinary consortium to develop a feder-ated health data network, comprised of six institutions across five countries, to facilitate Nordic-Baltic cooperation on secondary use of health data. The objective of this report is to offer early insights into our experiences developing this network. Methods: We used a mixed-method ap-proach, combining both experimental design and implementation science to evaluate the factors affecting the implementation of our network. Results: Technically, our experiments indicate that the network functions without significant performance degradation compared to centralized simu-lation. Conclusion: While use of interdisciplinary approaches holds a potential to solve challeng-es associated with establishing such collaborative networks, our findings turn the spotlight on the uncertain regulatory landscape playing catch up and the significant operational costs.
@article{arxiv.2409.17865,
title = {Implementing a Nordic-Baltic Federated Health Data Network: a case report},
author = {Taridzo Chomutare and Aleksandar Babic and Laura-Maria Peltonen and Silja Elunurm and Peter Lundberg and Arne Jönsson and Emma Eneling and Ciprian-Virgil Gerstenberger and Troels Siggaard and Raivo Kolde and Oskar Jerdhaf and Martin Hansson and Alexandra Makhlysheva and Miroslav Muzny and Erik Ylipää and Søren Brunak and Hercules Dalianis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17865},
year = {2024}
}