engleski

Is Hera a Panacea for Making a European Health Union Reality

The health information systems in the European Union (EU) are an example of politically ambitious, technically impressive, and driven-by- science mechanisms. Several international indicators and data sets are currently in function, such as Eurostat, World Health Organization Health for All database, and Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development health data, serving as broad data platforms. Others have a more specific focus, such as data sets and venues of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). More than Sixty indicators are already up and running, and data can be disaggregated by sex, age, socio-economic status, and region. The European Core Health Indicators (ECHI) data tool offers data on ECHI indicators and other European health indicators available in different formats (1). The whole system and the unique tools seem to be highly efficient, functional, and integrated. However, when on January 30, 2020, the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern, and a pandemic on March 11, 2020, all data flows, and information systems in public health underwent a radical stress test. The wake-up a call was deafening, ringing the bell for information bureaucrats working in a giant information balloon. Unprecedented information chaos ensued: the new coronavirus proved to be a challenge completely different from the recent SARS-CoV-1 (2002-2003), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (2012), and Ebola (2014) epidemics and pandemics. SARS-CoV-2 exposed the information structures that were once considered stable and functional as unreliable, fragile, and questionable. Predictions of scientists and institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, USA), ECDC (Stockholm, Sweden), or the Institute for Health Metrics (Washington, USA) about the pandemic were sometimes contributing to the growing chaos. Poor predicting models were causing great harm by sometimes leading to devastating decisions about resource allocation and serial lockdowns. As Ioannidis et al. put it: “We need models which incorporate multicriteria objective functions. Isolating infectious impact from all other health, economic, and social impacts is dangerously narrow-minded. More importantly, with epidemics becoming easier to detect, opportunities for declaring global emergencies will escalate. Erroneous models can become powerful, recurrent disruptors of life on this planet. Epidemic incidentalomas threaten civilization.” (2). The official sources of information, such as national health information institutes and statistical offices, lost their authority. The loss of authority was also a consequence of the tendency among many working in science (and medicine in particular) to generate “fast-food science” or to present science as if it were a religion. This applies also to public health policy as an inherently political exercise, as well as to every new health program, which is subjected to ideological biases, political priorities, social environment, and budgetary constraints

HERA ; European Health Union, Health Data Space

nije evidentirano