VALO – Value from Nordic health data

The Nordic Council of Ministers launched the VALO (Value from Nordic Health Data) project to establish common Nordic principles for implementing the European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation and to explore how to make the most of the opportunities offered by Nordic cooperation in health-related research, development and innovation (RDI). The aim is to strengthen the Nordic countries’ leading position and competitiveness in this area.

The Nordic countries offer significant potential for clinical research. They maintain extensive, high-quality population-level health data registers, with national personal identifiers enabling linkage across registers. These exist alongside high levels of trust in public institutions and a strong research culture. VALO builds on these strengths and aims to boost RDI activities in the region.

The project’s main objectives are to:

1. strengthen Nordic cooperation and the use of health data in research, development and innovation; 
2. jointly prepare for the EHDS by starting the implementation of reforms and sharing best practices; 
3. test in practice and demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-border Nordic cooperation in the use of health data; and
4. achieve and maintain Nordic leadership in the secondary use of health data.

Results arising from the VALO project are:

• the development of a Nordic cooperation model for the secondary use of health data and value creation;
• the establishment of an EHDS2 Competence Forum to support information exchange between Nordic ministries, government agencies and authorities, and to prepare for a coordinated and harmonised implementation of the EHDS; and
• the demonstration of Nordic cooperation through pilot research projects based on federated analysis, increasing knowledge of how to work technically and semantically with distributed health data in the Nordic countries. 

The project is fully funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.

The first phase of the VALO project ran from February 2024 to October 2025. The follow-up project, VALO2, began partly in parallel in April 2025 and will run until October 2026.

Health data has long been used in the Nordic countries for research, development and innovation. The utilisation of data has often been difficult, particularly when information must be obtained from patient registers across several countries.

With the EHDS, the EU is working to remove the barriers to cross-border data use.

The Nordic countries’ strengths lie in the quality of their social and health data registers, collected over a long period of time, and in their secure use. Personal identifiers make it easy to link data from several registers. In addition, the Nordic countries adopted electronic health record systems relatively early.

VALO is a joint project between Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, with Estonia and Lithuania as observers with access to all project materials and the opportunity to participate in meetings. The organisations involved are listed below.

• From Denmark: the Danish Health Data Authority
• From Finland: Sitra (the coordinator of VALO), the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL, financial administration of VALO), the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (STM), the Finnish Social and Health Data Permit Authority Findata
• From Iceland: the Ministry of Health, the Directorate of Health and the University of Iceland, the National Bioethics Committee of Iceland (Vísindasiðanefnd) (observer) 
• From Norway: the Norwegian Institute of Public Health
• From Sweden: the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, the National Board of Health and Welfare, the Swedish eHealth Agency, the Swedish Health and Social Care Inspectorate (IVO) (observer), Statistics Sweden (SCB) (observer), the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Etikprövningsmyndigheten, EPM) (observer)
• From Estonia (observer): the Ministry of Social Affairs 
• From Lithuania (observer): the Ministry of Health, the National Health Insurance Fund, the Vilnius University Hospital Santaros klinikos, the Hospital of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Kauno klinikos, the Lithuanian National Cancer Institute, the Vilnius University Faculty of Medicine Science Center