EDPB : PROCESSING OF HEALTH-RELATED DATA FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH PURPOSES

06 February 2021

The European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”) has recently released a Document on response to the request from the European Commission for clarifications on the consistent application of the GDPR, focusing on health research.

On 8 July 2020, the European Commission submitted to the EDPB under Article 70 of the GDPR a request for clarification on the consistent application of the GDPR, focussing on health research, and provided a list of concrete questions related to data processing for health related research.

In this Document including the responses of the EDPB to the questions of the European Commission is a first attempt to take away some of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations as to the application of the GDPR to the domain of scientific health research. After the release of the Document, the EDPB will elaborate on this issue in its Guidelines on the processing of personal data for scientific research purposes (currently under preparation, due in 2021).

Main headings of the Document are as follows :

  1. Complying with Data Protection and Ethics Obligations: Legal Basis for Processing of Health-Related Data for Scientifıc Research Purposes
  2. Further Processing of Previously Collected Health Data
  3. The Notion of Broad Consent
  4. Transparency of Data Processing: Information to be provided to the Data Subject and Storage Limitation
  5. Anonymisation, Pseudonymisation and other Safeguards under Article 89(1) GDPR
  6. General Questions: Processing of Special Categories of Data on a Large Scale and International Cooperation

You can reach the full text of the Document here.  

Should you have any queries and/or remarks, please do not hesitate to contact us. 

Kind regards,

Zumbul Attorneys-at-Law

info@zumbul.av.tr