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MIDAS (Meaningful Integration of Data Analytics and Services) will address the needs of policy makers and citizens across Europe by delivering a unified big data platform. This platform will map, acquire, manage, model, process and exploit existing heterogeneous health care data and other governmental data along with external open data to enable the creation of evidence-based actionable information. As a result, this platform will inform better long term policy-making decisions and yield a positive impact on point of care health in all policies across Europe at regional, national and European levels.
Health care systems already store enormous quantities of valuable heterogeneous data with many gatekeepers protecting this data and no consistent methodologies for managing consent or for governing any secondary use of the data. Governments are collating and providing non-personal open data while European citizens are also collating valuable sources of electronic data via mobile devices and social networks. Such data sources are currently stored in heterogeneous locations and use different standards with no clear policy directives. Policy makers and gatekeepers of this data lack the capability to map and overlay these sources, and th
erefore lack the capability to create, extract and take action on this information. MIDAS will therefore seek to overcome this challenge.
The project will involve managers of the health care systems, patients and citizens across the participating regions. This will ensure that solutions are tested, feedback is received, results are actionable and the best methods are developed across a range of epidemiology challenges. Importantly, it will also ensure the long-term sustainability of the results through the MIDAS Policy Board, which includes policy makers, public and private data gatekeepers and representatives of public health agencies.
Funding Mechanism
The MIDAS project was funded under the call SC1-PM-18-2016 ‘Big Data supporting Public Health policies’: