Hale and Hearty Project

The Hale and Hearty Knowledge Base, a project lead by the Irish Government, supported by the EU Connecting European Facility (CEF)

This is an EU funded project that looks at improving access to health and wellbeing information.  This project will be managed by the Open Data Unit in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) and completed by the partners to the Action.  The project partners are:

• Central Statistics Office
• Dept. of Health
• Fingal County Council
• Derilinx
• Ireland’s Data Cloud Cluster (IDCC)

It aims to make health and wellbeing information more easily accessible to the public- to use this information to improve their own health and wellbeing and to see it in the context of their personal health information and activities.  

It will also be used by data managers- to provide additional context to health statistics and to drive health and wellbeing initiatives.  The project will provide health and wellbeing related information, open data and a health and wellbeing app. 

Healthcare is a central service for any society, but information pertaining to what services are available is not always readily available. In addition, in an effort to stay healthy, people are not only interested in acute and primary care services, but also in amenities that promote health and fitness, both physical and mental. These can include sports and recreation amenities, community groups, local clubs, cultural activities, etc.

This will involve the harmonisation and linking of data from many sources, including Local Authorities, the Central Statistics Office, and Healthcare Providers. Data will be available dynamically through APIs, as well as via user-friendly interfaces, dashboards and maps.  The project will also provide health and wellbeing related information to individuals in a personal context and in relation to their locality and to others of a similar lifestyle.

This project will focus on high-value datasets related to the health and wellbeing sector, namely geospatial data, statistical data, mobility data, healthcare data, and recreation and amenity data. To achieve this the project will:

• identify relevant datasets,
• identify work needed on the datasets
• promote harmonisation
• build a catalogue of datasets.

The Hale & Hearty Knowledge Base will support the deployment of new innovative services by providing up-to-date API access to health and wellbeing data from a number of key Irish sources.  These will include the CSO demographic and mobility data, Local Government data, OSi data on the location of sports and amenity facilities, NTA data and health research data. 

Through this Action, we want to ensure that the data available is of high-quality and relevant for a wide variety of services. In particular, when looking at applications in the health and wellbeing sector, there is no “one size fits all” solution. It is therefore important that data users - analysts, app developers, policy-makers, researchers, etc. - have the information and tools at hand so that they can build solutions and strategies for end users – the public, businesses, service providers, etc

Hale & Hearty is funded by the European Commission’s Innovation and Networks Executive Agency, under the 2019 Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom Call - Public Open Data (CEF-TC-2019-2).