In a compelling editorial for Nature Portfolio Digital Medicine, Harvard University's Dr. Joseph Kvedar and University of Alberta's Dr. Daniel C. Baumgart highlight how we're entering a new era of healthcare—one driven by collaborative health data and the transformative power of AI. Germany and Europe are emerging as trailblazers in this shift, setting the pace for global progress in Digital Health and AI pioneering health data sharing at scale through:

📌Germany's Health Data Lab — opening research access to data from 75 million citizens (that’s 90% of the population!)
📌Germany's Medical Informatics Initiative — accelerating the knowledge transition from health and life science data into patient care
📌Germany’s Learning Systems Platform for Artificial Intelligence — uniting experts from science, industry, politics, and civic organizations
📌Germany’s AI Centers of Excellence Network — six top research institutions
📌Germany’s National AI Observatory  — studying AI impact on work and society
📌Germany’s new  Federal Ministry of Research, Digital Transformation, Technology, and Aerospace
📌The European Union's  European Health Data Space (EHDS) enabling secure, ethical use of health data from 449 million EU citizens
📌The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking with AI Gigafactories — ecosystems to foster AI innovation, collaboration, and development

This is more than policy — it's a paradigm shift.✨

🧠 The vision? A learning health system powered by population-scale data, federated access, and trustworthy AI to:

✅ Advance precision health
✅ Empower patients and researchers across borders
✅ Improve public health outcomes
✅ Respect privacy through GDPR-compliant architectures

🇪🇺 🇩🇪🤝🌐Now is the time for North America and the world to join in, collaborate, and amplify impact globally.

🌉 Let’s build bridges. Not silos. The future of healthcare is global, data-driven, and collaborative.

📕Full Paper:
🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01631-0 

📘Background on collaborative health data sharing:
🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01005-y
🔗https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)00191-6/fulltext