The kick-off meeting of the BETTER (Better rEal-world healTh-daTa distributEd analytics Research platform) project took place between April 10 and 11, 2024. A research unit from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, coordinated by Pietro Pinoli with the collaboration of Anna Bernasconi and Cinzia Cappiello, participates in the project.

The project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program and the UK Research and Innovation Program, proposes a robust decentralized infrastructure which will empower researchers, innovators and healthcare professionals to exploit the full potential of larger sets of multi-source health data via tailored made AI tools useful to compare, integrate, and analyze in a secure, cost-effective fashion, with the very final aim of supporting improvement of citizen's health outcomes.

In detail, the interdisciplinary project proposes 3 use cases involving 7 medical centers located in the EU and beyond, where sensitive patient data, including genomics, is made available and analyzed in a GDPR compliant. The proposed clinical use cases focus on evidence-based research on Pediatric Intellectual Disability, Inherited Retinal Dystrophies, and Autism Spectrum Disorders. Within the use cases innovative digital tools, technologies and methods will be researched, developed and validated in real world scenarios.

The Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering Research Unit will work on overcoming cross-border barriers to health data integration, access, FAIRification, and preprocessing, and will handle the case of pediatric intellectual disability, dealing with the integration of genomic and phenotypic data from pediatric rare diseases.