How GDPR Enhances Transparency and Fosters Pseudonymisation in Academic Medical Research.

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has dotted the i's and crossed the t's in the context of academic medical research. One year into GDPR, it is clear that a change of mind and the uptake of new procedures is required. Research organisations have been looking at the possibility to establish a code-of-conduct, good practices and/or guidelines for researchers that translate GDPR's abstract principles to concrete measures suitable for implementation. We introduce a proposal for the implementation of GDPR in the context of academic research which involves the processing of health related data, as developed by a multidisciplinary team at the University Hospitals Leuven. The proposal is based on three elements, three stages and six specific safeguards. Transparency and pseudonymisation are considered key to find a balance between the need for researchers to collect and analyse personal data and the increasing wish of data subjects for informational control.

Integrating images into a central medical information system.

Of the information items that must be easily available to the different actors involved in the care process, radiological images are not the least important. While until recently it was not feasible to include these into the medical information system, this situation has changed. Still, emphasis in PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) is primarily on the technological aspects. In this paper, in contrast, we stress the importance of integration of images into the overall workflow and into the overall medical record. We do so using illustrations from the PACS project of the University Hospitals Leuven. We briefly indicate that tight integration at the user interface level is needed, and that this requires more than standardized communication between subsystems.

Web-access to a central medical record to improve cooperation between hospital and referring physicians.

We set up Web-access to the central electronic medical record of the University Hospitals Leuven. Purpose was to enable external physicians to more actively participate in the care process as full members of the multidisciplinary treatment team. They get a view on the complete care process in the hospital, and can access results as these become available instead of being provided summary information post factum. This complements traditional electronic exchange between healthcare records. We report on technical setup and results from an extended pilot. We believe that this approach can enrich the discussion on how to provide the "global medical record".