{"id":263191,"date":"2026-01-02T10:06:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T10:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/263191\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T10:06:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T10:06:24","slug":"estonia-is-linking-a-super-genome-database-to-patient-records-is-it-safe-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/263191\/","title":{"rendered":"Estonia is linking a super genome database to patient records. Is it safe? \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At a time when trust in institutions \u2014 including in health care \u2014\u00a0is being <a href=\"https:\/\/pro.politico.eu\/news\/205884\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">eroded<\/a> by mis- and disinformation, Estonia has won the population\u2019s support to safely store and share all personal and health data. Support is so high that only 2,500 people \u2014 less than 0.2 percent of the population \u2014\u00a0have opted out of sharing their data between health services on the platform.<\/p>\n<p>Estonia has a &#8220;high level of societal trust for new technologies &#8230; [because] we experience the benefit,\u201d said Siim Saare, founder and CEO of Lifeyear, which operates a remote cardiac care platform. &#8220;We see the added value and how it makes our lives easier every day. And it outweighs any theoretical risks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Those benefits include seamless transfers of care between a general practitioner, hospitals, clinics, nurses, paramedics and other health services; the use of AI to identify patients at higher risk of disease, to offer targeted screening to diagnose and treat patients earlier for illnesses such as cancer; and saving time from never repeating or uploading the same information twice.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe estimation is that every Estonian saves two full weeks of time in a year because you don\u2019t have to queue up, you don\u2019t have to find your old birth certificate every five years or whenever you need it, you don\u2019t have to say again and again where you live, because you\u2019re in the system already,\u201d Sven Sakkov, the Estonian ambassador to the U.K., told POLITICO at a press lunch in London.<\/p>\n<p>Beefing up security<\/p>\n<p>Estonia is a world leader on digital services and has long claimed the moniker of &#8220;e-stonia&#8221; to underline its digital savvy. It bet big on technology and startups to counter a flatlining 1990s economy, and transformed much of its government services early on to run online.<\/p>\n<p>In some countries, like former East Germany, historic Soviet occupation left a <a href=\"https:\/\/pro.politico.eu\/news\/175459\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">paranoia over the handing of digital data<\/a>. In Estonia, though, the pivot to digital services instilled a high level of trust in the government&#8217;s handling of privacy and digital health systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a time when trust in institutions \u2014 including in health care \u2014\u00a0is being eroded by mis- and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[275],"tags":[120889,982,8626,18,37809,458,135,475,37814,135150,474,19,17,135151,4111,2101,11031],"class_list":{"0":"post-263191","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-cyber-warfare","9":"tag-cybersecurity","10":"tag-diagnostics","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-estonia","13":"tag-genetics","14":"tag-health","15":"tag-health-care","16":"tag-health-data","17":"tag-health-security","18":"tag-healthcare","19":"tag-ie","20":"tag-ireland","21":"tag-personalized-medicines","22":"tag-prevention","23":"tag-public-health","24":"tag-research-and-development"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115824950182882631","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}