Preparing Hospitals for the European Health Data Space: RISE Reflects on Four Years of AIDAVA

Hospitals hold a great deal of information about their patients, but very little of it is stored in a way that can simply be picked up and reused. Each time it is needed for something new, such as a national report or a research request, someone sorts it out again from scratch. This is becoming increasingly important as the European Health Data Space enters implementation, with key requirements for the cross-border exchange and reuse of health data applying from 2029.

AIDAVA, an EU research project that ran from September 2022 to August 2026, tested an approach that could help hospitals meet these requirements: preparing and structuring health data once, then making it available for multiple purposes without repeating the same work each time.

Working with four hospitals in Estonia, Austria and the Netherlands, in three languages, the team took a single properly prepared patient record and used it to produce three completely different outputs, without repeating the preparation step for each:

• a patient summary of the kind hospitals will have to produce from 2029;
• a data set for a breast cancer registry shared between countries;
• a heart risk score for the doctor treating the patient.

The registry data set took under a minute, against roughly 20 minutes the usual way. Across all 27 EU countries, the team estimated that preparing data once and reusing it could cost around €1.04 billion over five years instead of around €6.6 billion, which is 84% less. These figures come from an internal AIDAVA cost model based on a set of business assumptions and estimates and still need checking against real national data.

The project also identified limitations. The part of the system that reads doctors' notes written as ordinary text found about seven in ten of the medical terms correctly, so people still must check the complex cases. The project's message to policymakers is that meeting the 2029 deadlines and getting real value out of European health data are two separate things, and it sets out recommendations, covering pilots in member states, shared European groundwork for describing health data, funding, skills and clearer certification rules.

RISE's role in AIDAVA

AIDAVA was coordinated by Maastricht University, with RISE responsible for much of the activities across project coordination, innovation management, communication, dissemination, exploitation and sustainability. Its work spanned two central work packages: WP7 on Project Management and Scientific Coordination and WP6 on Innovation Management.

RISE kept the risk monitoring process running, managed contractual matters including amendments, and supported periodic reporting and financial monitoring towards the European Commission.

On innovation management, RISE helped the consortium identify its most promising results, clarify their ownership and plan how they could be further developed and used beyond the project.

Moreover, RISE supported AIDAVA's communication and dissemination activities, including management of the project website and social media channels and the publication of project results through Zenodo.

AIDAVA showed that health data does not have to be prepared from scratch every time someone needs it. Getting from that idea to something that works in a real hospital takes doctors, patients, software developers and data specialists pulling in the same direction, in this case - across ten countries and three languages. Keeping those perspectives aligned over four years and helping turn excellent research into results that can be used beyond the project was an important part of RISE’s role, said Josip Luša, Research and Impact Manager at RISE.

AIDAVA (AI-powered Data Curation and Publishing Virtual Assistant) ran from September 2022 to August 2026 with a budget of €8.6 million and 14 partners across 9 countries, coordinated by Maastricht University. Horizon Europe Grant Agreement No. 101057062. https://www.aidava.eu

Key figures: 4 hospitals, 3 countries, 3 languages. 84 patients enrolled (G2 evaluation), 74 completed. More than 2,100 documents processed. Modelled EU-27 five year cost: approx. €6.6 billion conventional versus approx. €1.04 billion AI-assisted. Estimated annual clinical value of reusable records, conservatively attributed: €3 to €6 billion.

AIDAVA has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101057062. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.