On 25 October 2017, DigEnlight - a value-driven non-profit association which stimulate multi-stakeholder discussions and collaborations concerning digitisation in society - organised a one-day workshop in Brussels entitled “Towards a European Ecosystem for Health Care Data”.

During this workshop, Manuel Pérez - one of the Atos' CrowdHEALTH team members - spoke about "Data-Analytics-as-a-Service (DAaaS) for Healthcare" and participated as an expert in the panel "Building a health care data ecosystem".

Manuel highlighted that big data and cloud are two of the trends that are defining the emerging digital transformation in healthcare. In his opinion, DAaaS is providing cloud-based analytical capabilities over a variety of industries, including healthcare; the provision of big data capabilities using cloud delivery models will bring cost savings and competitive advantages.

He also noted that performing analytics in the cloud presents many challenges; one of them is that real time processing requires different features than non-real time environments, an aspect which is being explored in the CrowdHEALTH project.

Manuel explained to the audience of experts at this workshop that CrowdHEALTH aims to deliver a secure ICT platform to collect and aggregate high volumes of health data from multiple information sources in Europe, and also CrowdHEALTH's evolution of patient health records (PHR) towards holistic health records (HHRs), enriched to become “Social HHRs” to capture the clinical, social and human factors.