The Bioethics Committee of Catalonia approves the VISC+ Project

The Catalan health system takes care of 45 million patients annually, prescribes 140 million electronic prescriptions and has 60 million documents in its shared medical record. All of these data can be very important for the scientific community in order to progress in medical research. The VISC+ Project, the differential value of which lies in the reuse of data, represents the arrival of Big Data in the health world. This project can help to improve treatments and to develop the research field, according to the reference magazines The Journal of the American Medical Association and Nature Reviews. The Agency of Health Quality and Evaluation (AQuAS), which is behind the project, sent the project to the Bioethics Committee of Catalonia (CBC) so that it could assess the potential risks for people’s privacy, apart from the possible conflicts between the institutions and the people involved.

With almost thirty experts from different disciplines including medicine, health management, psychology, philosophy and law, the CBC is the professional association which gives advice on all the actions in the bioethics field that are implemented by the Catalan Health Department and the bodies that depend on it. This interdisciplinary, independent and plural committee tackles the problems generated by the biological and medical progress, as well as its consequences on the value system of the society that hosts them. Last May, the CBC issued the report “Ethical principles and guidelines for the reuse of the information of the Catalan health system in research, innovation and evaluation”, where ethical and privacy aspects of the VISC+ Project were analysed.

The main conclusions of the report show that the project is transparent and that it respects both the ethical principles and data security. Therefore, the anonymity and privacy of the citizens’ data are ensured. It also considers that the implementation of the project is an opportunity to improve the quality and sustainability of the public health system. Moreover, it acknowledges that, although in a first phase only the researchers of the Catalan public research centres and of the SISCAT centres will be able to access the VISC+ data, in a second phase of the project it would be recommendable that staff from companies or private institutions should also be able to access them, provided that the objective is related to research in the field of health sciences.

AQuAS showed satisfaction at the CBC’s approval regarding the ethical guarantees of the project. In fact, most of the recommendations of the CBC’s report in this aspect, that is, the ethical and scientific criteria and principles, the procedures and guidelines and the guarantors of the ethical aspects, were in line with the paperwork presented by AQuAS when the project began. These guidelines on the re-use of health data have been also approved by the EU. Doctor Josep Maria Argimon, AQuAS director, said that the real goal of the project is to organise the data and to provide anonymised information in order to facilitate research. Thanks to the report from the CBC, from now on the research centres accredited by the CERCA will have more statistical and analytical capacity to develop their investigations and continue progressing in research and innovation.