Published: 07-03-2019 14:05 | Updated: 05-02-2020 13:10

KI researchers receive H2020 grant in ‘Trusted Digital Solutions and Cybersecurity in Health and Care’ call

Recently, researchers from NVS and LIME attended the kick off meeting for the H2020 financed project CUREX - Secure and private health data exchange in Athens, Greece. The sixteen-member strong consortium, coordinated by University of Piraeus Research Center (UPRC) in Athens, will join effort to address privacy and cybersecurity risks inherent in digital health care systems.

The project aims to develop a platform with a decentralised architecture, enhanced with a private block chain infrastructure that ensures the integrity of the risk assessment process and of all data transactions that occur between the diverse ranges of stakeholders involved.

KI will be an active part in all work packages and lead one of three use case tasks – a proof of concept study with a remote healthcare application. The participation from KI is a collaboration between research groups from the departments Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society (NVS) and Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), divisions of Family Medicine and Primary Care and Health Informatics Centre (HIC) respectively.

An increased use of digital health care solutions not only puts demands on their infrastructure and usability for different stakeholders, but also implies the necessity to comply with European legislation and protection of Personally Identifiable information (PII), to provide health care data that can be integrated in to research and development and to address all security risks and measurements in order to provide a robust and trustworthy solution.

The consortium

The CUREX consortium is comprised of two large ICT Industries (Atos, Intrasoft), three healthcare organisations (Servicio Madrileno De Salud (SERMAS), Fundació Privada Hospital Asil de Granollers (FPHAG), Karolinska Institutet (KI)), six dynamic SMEs (Almerys, Cyberlens, Suite5, time.lex, 8BELLS, Ubitech) whose participation exceeds 20%, and five academic partners/independent evaluators (UPRC, University of Surrey, Universidad Polytécnica de Madrid, University of Cyprus, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) whose participation is supported by their strong focus on innovative research.

The project is funded by Horizon2020, the European Union research framework program, and will run from December 2018 until November 2021.

Sokratis Nifakos, MSc, LIME; Marina Taloyan, Associate Professor, NVS; Natalia Stathakaou, MSC, LIME and Panos Papachristou, MD/PhD, NVS