ABSTRACT
Health data collected during healthcare provision is essential for advancing medical research and public health. However, patient data contains sensitive information about an individual’s health, collected in a medical setting subject to the special protection of medical confidentiality. Due to the unique nature of the patient–physician relationship, healthcare professionals are legally and ethically bound to safeguard patient identity and information collected about them. Based on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which strikes a balance between the public interest in the re-use of such data and the patient’s interest in medical confidentiality, the European Health Data Space Regulation endorses the secondary use of electronic health record data that has been collected in this sensitive environment. This chapter scrutinises relevant rules on the secondary use of electronic health records under the European Health Data Space from the perspective of patient confidentiality. To achieve this, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the text of the GDPR are analysed to elaborate to what extent the European Health Data Space framework on secondary use accounts for patient confidentiality.
