What is FACILITATE

FACILITATE is a 4-year project launched by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) which primary aim is to enable clinical trial participants to access and make use of their personal health data gathered during studies, to allow a better shared medical decision-making with the health professionals involved in their care and to create a process that allows data to be re-used also in future research.

Its overall goal is to develop an innovative data-sharing and re-use process within a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant and approved ethical framework, not only to allow the access and portability of patient data but also to change the role of patients in the strategy and design of clinical trials – with many new rights and responsibilities – becoming an active component of the drug development process.

The project will first seek to create an ethical, legal, and regulatory ecosystem that provides clear rules for all stakeholders who are engaging patients and managing their very important health data. With that framework in place, FACILITATE will then aim to develop technological solutions to support the sharing and re-use of data as agreed, first, with the patients.

The idea is that patient study data could be available for cross-referencing with other repositories – improving upon the current situation, in which clinical data are siloed in separate repositories and unable to be used outside of the clinical trial. FACILITATE will ensure that the whole process, from the collection of data to its destruction or anonymization including its sharing and re-use, is legally and ethically compliant and aligned with the study participants’ but also hospitals’, academia, and industries’ voice.