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The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is very much a global health issue and requires collaborative, international health research efforts to address it. A valuable source of information for researchers is the large amount of digital health data that are continuously collected by electronic health record systems at health care organizations. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be the key legal framework with regard to using and sharing European digital health data for research purposes. However, concerns persist that the GDPR has made many organizations very risk-averse in terms of data sharing, even if the regulation permits such sharing. Health care organizations focusing on individual risk minimization threaten to undermine COVID-19 research efforts. In our opinion, there is an ethical obligation to use the research exemption clause of the GDPR during the COVID-19 pandemic to support global collaborative health research efforts. Solidarity is a European value, and here is a chance to exemplify it by using the GDPR regulatory framework in a way that does not hinder but actually fosters solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic. ; National Institutes of Health (Grant R01 EB017205)

As the UK sits in painful deadlock over Brexit, it is important to remember that governments are regularly faced with crises, and their responses can create enduring benefit for future generations. Back in 1858, for example, the UK parliament was dealing with another messy crisis: "the great stink." In a world before sanitation, the river Thames had become an open latrine, and as summer blossomed parliament was engulfed in a pestilential stench. £2.5 million (about £300 million in today's money) was hastily approved to build a network of sewers throughout the capital.1 This particular model of sanitation, developed by Bazalgette, was adopted by other cities around the world and the rest, as they say, is history. It is now unthinkable that a developed nation would not have sanitation infrastructure. However, back in 1858 the debate was whether sanitation infrastructure was worthy of investment and whether it was a public or private good. A similar debate has been simmering for some time regarding health data infrastructure, defined as the hardware and software to securely aggregate, store, process and transmit healthcare data. Is data infrastructure necessary for healthcare organizations and if so, is it the responsibility of individual healthcare organizations, of local health systems, or is it a public good? [First paragraph] ; National Institute of Health NIBIB (grant no. R01 EV017205)

With growing concerns that big data will only augment the problem of unreliable research, the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized the Critical Data Conference in January 2014. Thought leaders from academia, government, and industry across disciplines--including clinical medicine, computer science, public health, informatics, biomedical research, health technology, statistics, and epidemiology--gathered and discussed the pitfalls and challenges of big data in health care. The key message from the conference is that the value of large amounts of data hinges on the ability of researchers to share data, methodologies, and findings in an open setting. If empirical value is to be from the analysis of retrospective data, groups must continuously work together on similar problems to create more effective peer review. This will lead to improvement in methodology and quality, with each iteration of analysis resulting in more reliability.