A new Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) project, FORTIFY, has been launched to support the responsible use of secondary health data for research, while safeguarding intellectual property, trade secrets, and commercially sensitive information. The initiative will develop and test practical safeguards—including contracts, governance models, and traceability mechanisms—to enable trusted data sharing within the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
Teamit joins the consortium as a partner, having been closely involved from the early stages in shaping the proposal and building the public–private collaboration, and will contribute to project management, multistakeholder governance, and communications and outreach.
The secondary use of health data has the potential to accelerate research, drive innovation, and improve healthcare—one of the core ambitions of the European Health Data Space (EHDS). Despite this potential, important challenges remain.
For many organisations, health data is closely linked to valuable innovation assets, such as proprietary datasets, know-how, trade secrets, and commercially sensitive information. Without clear and practical safeguards, organisations may hesitate to share high-value data, slowing progress and limiting Europe’s capacity to innovate.
To address these challenges, FORTIFY will develop and validate a practical set of tools that help EHDS actors share and reuse health data responsibly while safeguarding innovation.
DURATION
36 months
(May 2026 – April 2029)
FUNDING
Innovative Health Initiative
Joint Undertaking (IHI JU)
CONSORTIUM
33 partners across academia,
industry, healthcare, policy
and patient organisations
COORDINATOR
Karolinska Institutet (KI)
PROJECT LEAD
Johnson & Johnson (J&J)
FORTIFY is designed to ensure that health data can be reused responsibly while protecting innovation. At Teamit, we support this mission through strong project management, stakeholder engagement, and impactful communication. This will ultimately result is a stronger European health ecosystem where data drives faster discoveries and improved patient outcomes.
Maica Llavero, Head of EU-Funded Projects
The project will provide guidance on managing intellectual property and commercially sensitive information, alongside model contracts and templates for data access. It will also develop governance tools and technical solutions—such as traceability, watermarking, and synthetic or anonymised data approaches—to support risk management. Training and policy recommendations will further support stakeholders in adopting these solutions across the EHDS. Through its diverse partners, FORTIFY is designed to respond to the needs of the full European health data ecosystem:
- For health data holders (HDH) —such as hospitals, research institutions, biobanks, and industry—the project will provide clearer rules, practical guidance, and ready-to-use tools to enable the sharing of high-value data with confidence, while safeguarding competitive assets.
- Health data users (HDU), including researchers and innovators, will benefit from improved access to high-quality data under clearer and more predictable conditions, reducing legal and operational uncertainty.
- For Health Data Access Bodies (HDAB), FORTIFY will support more consistent and efficient decision-making by providing structured procedures and practical tools to assess data access requests, including those involving intellectual property or commercially sensitive information.
- For patients and citizens, the project aims to strengthen trust by ensuring that health data is reused responsibly, securely, and in the public interest—supporting faster research, innovation, and the development of improved treatments.
A dedicated Multi-stakeholder Forum will play a key role in guiding and validating the project’s outputs, ensuring that the solutions developed are practical, consistent, and aligned with real-world needs.
As part of the FORTIFY consortium, Teamit will contribute to project management, multi-stakeholder governance, communications and outreach. Through these roles, the team will support effective coordination across partners, foster engagement among diverse stakeholders, and lead communication and outreach efforts throughout the project, promoting ongoing communication, dissemination, and uptake of its results.
Explore the FORTIFY project, its objectives, and upcoming activities here: http://fortify-ehds.eu/
