Revision of the European Data Protection Directive: opportunity or threat for public health monitoring?

The link between public health monitoring on one hand and data protection legislation on the other may not be immediately clear to all. Nevertheless, it has a strong relation with the conditions required to build and correctly operate high quality, sustainable public health information systems. The following public health goals are directly influenced by the data protection legislative framework: Maintaining systems of EU health indicators1 is central to achieve these goals and can only be realized by integrating data sources in all Member States (MS). However, as a consequence of an uneven implementation of the EU Data Protection Directive (DPD),2 access to individual (micro) data appears to be still limited and heterogeneous, …