Digi.me is delighted to announce it has been awarded MedMij accreditation, the official Netherlands standard for secure exchange of health data between care users and care providers.
MedMij allows accredited providers of Personal Health Environments (PGOs in Dutch) to enable patients to own and control their medical data records.
As a global interoperability and consent service, digi.me enables individuals to obtain a copy of their personal data and add it to any eHealth apps they use. This private sharing function gives users access to all available services – for example being able to share their medical history with doctors, even on holiday – while maintaining full privacy.
As a user’s digi.me personal data store also holds lifestyle information including fitness, wearables, and – in the not-too-distant future – shopping transactions in addition to health data, these can be combined to help generate insights aimed at a healthier life.
While Iceland, where digi.me enabled electronic health record access, was the first country to have a national citizen-facing API, the Netherlands has been the first to put the tech, governance and commercial elements together into a framework called MedMij. Built on the international HL7 FHIR standard, MedMij opens up data to accredited citizen-facing services such as digi.me to give individuals control over their data, which they can then share on as they choose.
MedMij is another national accreditation for digi.me, a global market leader in this area, and joins an increasingly long line of health accreditations around the globe.
Digi.me is already accredited for use by EMIS in the UK’s National Health Service, in Iceland and in the US, where it connects to 100s of healthcare providers via electronic healthcare records providers Epic and Cerner.
The MedMij accreditation is also another move towards greater patient centricity in Europe, giving patients more control over their health data and care, as well as easing the burden on healthcare systems.
This new focus on data portability, compared to the traditional organisation-centric silos, is a boost to the EU’s aspirations for a pan-European digital health ecosystem, as well as digi.me’s own vision, which is centred on putting individuals back in control of their data.
And as digi.me continues to expand its connectivity, apps and services which integrate with it will be able to expand their reach into new territories too.
This is important to catalyse innovation and research, including for global health crises such as Covid-19, as well as contributing to even more privacy-centric approaches such as edge processing and federated systems.
When every citizen is equipped with their life data, including medical records, habits and behaviours, deploying technology to support them becomes easier while enhancing privacy.
Innovators and researchers can also recruit individuals directly, accelerating their access to data without the need for government and healthcare services to act as middlemen – more important than ever as health services are stretched to capacity dealing with Covid-19.
The service in the Netherlands will be rolling out over the coming weeks and months. Researchers and innovators who want to access secure and consented personal data (in particular in the UK, US, Netherlands, Iceland and Australia) please contact us.