Statement
More effective measures to advance secondary use of health and social data for research purposes – CSC calls for a more comprehensive revision of Finnish legislation
CSC recognizes that changes to Finland’s Act on the Secondary Use of Health and Social Data are heading to the right direction but notes that the impact of the suggested changes remains minimal if the requirements for secure processing environments in the current law will not be changed.
Even though some corrective action must be taken swiftly, the long-term goal must be to create uniform practices for international data sharing at European level. The Finnish law also requires a more comprehensive revision because applying the current law has made research both slow and expensive. Processing times for data access applications are long and fees for data access and data processing environments high.