EHDS

Can Canada Learn From the European Health Data Space Experience?

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This month I published two commentaries on what Canada might learn from Europe's experience developing and implementing the European Health Data Space Regulation.

In the Canadian Journal of Public Health, Kim McGrail, Luca Marelli and I argue that regulation alone cannot resolve the politics of health data access and use, and that value must be explicitly and inclusively defined rather than assumed.

In a companion piece for Policy Options, Kim McGrail and I take up Canada's newly announced health-sector data space to make the case that its hardest challenges won't be technical. Drawing on the EHDS experience, we argue that deciding what the space is for, and who it should serve, must be considered at the outset.

4S 2026 Toronto: The Global Politics of Digital Health

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Join me in Toronto for the annual 4S conference, where Dr. Luca Marelli (University of Milan), Dr. Jay Shaw (University of Toronto), Dr. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda (University of Guanajuato) and I will be hosting a panel on the global politics of digital health.

We are inviting papers that advance empirical and conceptual contributions related to health data sharing and integration. Rather than treating ‘global politics’ as a given, this panel will examine how these emerging orders are enacted, contested, and stabilized in practice.

Submit here.

Colloquium in Milan, Italy: Health Data Spaces in a Global Context

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Poster Credit: Benedetta Muda

On March 10-11, 2026 the EHDS Forum will be organizing its second meeting and a public colloquium in Milan, Italy, supported by the EASST Fund.

While often framed as technical and regulatory infrastructures, emerging health data spaces constitute full-fledged political projects that reshape relations between citizens, public institutions, and commercial actors.

This colloquium foregrounds key STS and policy themes raised by health data spaces, including questions of social license, public accountability, democratic legitimacy, and public value. The event also situates these developments within broader geopolitical dynamics concerning data sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and global power asymmetries.

By adopting a comparative and conceptual lens, this colloquium invites critical reflection on the governance, imaginaries, and broader socio-political dynamics underpinning emerging health data ecosystems.

Submission to Open Consultation: Governing the European Health Data Space

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Endorsed by the Lombardy Region Life Sciences Cluster, this discussion paper consolidates our research group’s recent submission to the TEHDAS2 second public consultation on the European Health Data Space Regulation.

The document addresses core aspects of the secondary use framework, including fee structures, permitted and prohibited uses of health data, metadata cataloguing, data access application and request procedures, enforcement and sanctions, and individual opt-out mechanisms.

We identify an important and largely unacknowledged issue related to expectations of value that inform key decisions throughout development and implementation of the EHDS.

We are pleased that in the revised documents, the vast majority of our recommendations were either partially or fully taken up.

Image Credit: Benedetta Muda