The creation of value from data is at the heart of Luxembourg's priorities, particularly in the health sector, where data is sensitive and strictly regulated by European and national laws. To facilitate data-driven innovation while ensuring the protection of personal data, Luxembourg has launched a pioneering initiative: Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS). Created at the end of 2022, the LNDS aims to develop solutions for the safe, secure and legal sharing and reuse of sensitive data.
Bert Verdonck, CEO of LNDS, explained that the organisation offers services that generate value from public sector data, while fully respecting confidentiality and regulation. Unlike initiatives in other countries, the LNDS takes a holistic approach, covering all sectors and supported by several Luxembourg ministries.
Secure environments for processing sensitive data
The NLDS focuses on the provision of controlled data by public entities, such as government administrations and research organisations, for research and analysis. Although many Luxembourg public data are already available on the data.public.lu platform, some sensitive data require restricted access, subject to authorisation and strict conditions.
Mr Verdonck pointed out that the main obstacles to data sharing were not technical, but rather legal and organisational. The NLDS develops services to help its partners share and access data appropriately. The intention is to provide access via secure environments allowing researchers to perform the agreed research without actually extracting the data, using encrypted and controlled digital environments.
Cross-border services
The NLDS is already collaborating on concrete projects, such as CLINNOVA, a cross-border research project focused on precision medicine. This project involves initiatives such as data federation and interoperability, in partnership with the Luxembourg Institute of Health. The LNDS also participates in European projects, such as GAIA-X, aimed at creating an open and federated data infrastructure in Europe.
Accelerate access to data
One of the major challenges remains the time it takes to access the data. Mr Verdonck explained that the ultimate goal was to enable research on large volumes of data much faster. Currently, it sometimes takes more than a year to obtain the necessary authorisations. The LNDS aims to reduce this period to less than one month, thus facilitating research on larger datasets and offering many benefits to society.
"If we can create all the services needed to process genomic data, I'm confident we can do it all!" concludes Mr. Verdonck.
Pictures: © Luxinnovation/Michel Brumat