WHO Health Data Summit

Question 1

You work at CERN as Senior Advisor for Relations with International Organizations and Principal Scientist Physics Department. What good data and research governance practices do you think non health-sector entities, such as CERN, can contribute to governing health data for better health outcomes? 

AS: Answer:

CERN - the largest laboratory for particle physics on the planet - continues to be a pioneer in pushing the frontiers of storing, sharing and managing massive amounts of data over the last decades. 

Our flagship program at the Large Hadron Collider in search of the Higgs Boson discovered in 2012 and subsequent pursuits, has resulted in a large body of experience with so called Big Data. 

Our data management challenge, whittled down currently peaks at 240 petabytes of data per year, and we’re going to exabytes and zettabytes (one trillion GB) imminently!

That said, we also use our experience, to facilitate the efforts, to address challenges beyond Particle Physics, related to UN sustainable development goals. 

Global partnerships for the SDGs on disease and health management probably require a paradigm shift complementary to academic freedom, fair knowledge-sharing and publishing in the digital age. 

Illustrating CERN's pioneering role as ‘pushing the envelope’ in this direction we publish a few 100 peer reviewed papers per year based on our data and share the work among thousands of scientists.

We have sought patterns and trends in our data at CERN to push scientific frontiers. The mechanisms deployed at CERN are now steering the path of correlating information trends and patterns in large data sets, that tackle real life issues.

An example is the very successful collaboration with UNITAR ie UNOSAT since nearly two decades, recently culminating in its recognition as United Nations Satellite Centre. 

CERN hosts the UNOSAT’s information technology infrastructure deploying state-of-the-art computing power, data storage and data, which directly feed into other United Nations initiatives, such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange platform for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 

Exploring how CERN could contribute to better health outcomes: We need to collaborate proactively to be ahead of the “big data management collaboration” curve, in order to shape better, more cohesive strategies.

Technology has  progressively permeated our society, to the point of shaping the dynamics of interactions, the pandemic has many lessons on bridging gaps and opening new challenges, for instance:

• Continuous acceleration of “big data” technological changes, requires policies capable of observation and identification of trends and shifts.
• Keeping track of the progressively growing complexity, interdisciplinary, heterogeneity of global issues.
• Being a scientist in the digital age means being a software producer and a software consumer. As a result, collaborative software-development platforms and developing research data-management tools, form the basis of research. 
• At CERN we have created the worldwide open-data services for example Zenodo, which stores, retrieves, analyses, displays data by the last mile user in the community.
• CERN that can contribute by sharing its successful data governance model on science, technology, innovation and education. To be further explored.

Q2 What one good data / research governance practice would you suggest to the Summit that could maximize health outcomes?

AS Answer:

As more interdisciplinary dots are joined together, the whole becomes larger than the parts for spotting correlations, mid and long term trends for disease and health management. We have the tools. We must collaborate and customize the CERN developments on the health sector, as we at CERN will continue to influence digital technologies and data certification and its management for a long time for accessing, analysing data, anytime and anywhere !