Towards a European Health Data Slice

The European Health Data Space (EHDS), as outlined by the European Commission, aims to create a secure, virtual, and logical space for exchanging personal health data across networks, domains, and national borders. However, no solutions have been proposed to integrate and connect advanced mobile healthcare applications into health data space (HDS). To handle this issue, this paper proposes a novel concept called the European Health Data Slice (EHDSL), where 5G network slicing will be utilized to integrate advanced mobile healthcare applications into the EHDS framework ensuring seamless and secure sharing of health data. We also suggested post-quantum robust methods defined by the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) for securing the EHDSL architecture. The paper also conducts a small-scale proof-of-concept for the EHDSL, where we developed a patient health interface that is capable of extracting health data from a hospital-grade medical device (patient monitor) and transmitting it to a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) server via 5G standalone (SA) network slicing. We compare the performance of 5G SA with 4G and 5G Non-standalone (NSA). The experimental results demonstrate that 5G SA outperforms 4G and 5G NSA in terms of uplink, downlink, latency, and availability.