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The Decentralised Health Data Space Infrastructure (dHDSI) is an open, secure, and interoperable infrastructure designed to operationalise the vision of the CRANE Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) initiative.
CRANE aims to develop an integrated, data-driven care model that improves the well-being of citizens with chronic conditions by enabling trusted access, sharing, and reuse of health data within a European health data ecosystem.
dHDSI provides the foundational infrastructure for this vision by establishing a decentralised health data space where patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, and researchers can securely exchange and utilise health data while preserving individual data sovereignty, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
Modern healthcare ecosystems generate large volumes of health-related data across hospitals, wearable devices, public health systems, and digital services. However, these datasets often remain fragmented across organisational silos due to legal, technical, and governance barriers.
dHDSI addresses this challenge by enabling secure, consent-based access to distributed health data across organisational boundaries, allowing stakeholders to derive meaningful insights while maintaining compliance with European data protection and governance frameworks.
The infrastructure supports CRANE’s objective of enabling citizen-centric health data management and self-management of chronic conditions, including conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and COPD.
Individuals retain control of their health data through digital wallets and consent dashboards that allow them to authorise or revoke access to their personal health information.
All data transactions are cryptographically secured and auditable, ensuring integrity, traceability, and compliance with frameworks such as GDPR.
Healthcare organisations and service providers can discover and connect to relevant data services through interoperable interfaces and a federated data marketplace.
dHDSI integrates trusted data intermediation services, enabling organisations to establish dynamic data-sharing agreements aligned with the EU Data Governance Act (DGA) and emerging European Health Data Space (EHDS) policies.
The infrastructure supports aggregating data from healthcare providers, personal health devices, and other contextual sources, enabling a holistic view of a citizen’s health.
Within the CRANE programme, dHDSI acts as the core infrastructure layer enabling:
- Citizen-centric management of personal health data
- Secure collaboration between healthcare providers and care ecosystems
- Ethical reuse of health data for research and innovation
- Creation of data-driven services supporting personalised care and patient self-management
By enabling trusted and interoperable data sharing across multiple stakeholders, dHDSI contributes to the technical and governance foundations required for the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
The dHDSI infrastructure contributes to the CRANE vision by:
- Empowering citizens to access and control their health data
- Supporting personalised care and proactive disease management
- Enabling data-driven healthcare innovation
- Creating a trusted ecosystem for secure health data exchange across Europe
Through this decentralised approach, dHDSI demonstrates how digital identity, consent management, and interoperable data infrastructure can unlock the value of health data while ensuring privacy, transparency, and trust.
The project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 965277. However, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible.