Despite decades of devoted research, cancer remains a tremendous health threat and societal burden. Europe's Beating Cancer Plan aims to improve the lives of more than 3 million people by 2030 by improving prevention, early detection, diagnostics, therapeutics, and quality of life. The biggest single hurdle here is the highly inadequate way cancer data, both from research and healthcare, are still being dealt with. While other areas of society (e.g. e-finance, e-commerce, logistics, travel, meteorology, etc.) have fully exploited advances in data and information technology to serve organisations as well as individual consumers, so far this has failed in the health domain. Consequently, cancer data are hard to Find, Access, make Interoperable and Reuse. Evidently this is not caused by lack of suitable technology, but rather by organisational, social and cultural causes. Inherently, solving the problem requires a cultural shift from the current craftsmanship approach to cancer research and data, to a drastic collaboration model at industrial scale. CANDLE therefore aims to scale-up and improve existing (inter)national health data infrastructures, align maximally with national EHDS implementations in member states, including HDAB’s, DAAMS’s and SPE’s. CANDLE will also identify and resolve potential barriers (https://www.health-ri.nl/en/participation/obstacles-removal-trajectory ) that jeopardize effective implementation of UNCAN.eu and ECPDC digital platforms. CANDLE aims to equipe data users and NCDN developers with a ‘ready-to-use' CANDLE Resource Kit in a process oriented (research journey, patient journey, data life cycle) way. In summary, CANDLE will provide an avenue towards a successful and highly desired data transformation in European cancer research and serve as a catalyzer for the UNCAN.eu and ECPDC platforms by advancing the development of NCDNs to reach the goal of the Cancer Mission and Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, i.e. reducing the burden of cancer.

XpanDH is a CSA aiming at mobilizing and building capacity in individuals and organisations to create, adapt and explore purposeful use of interoperable digital health solutions based on a shared adoption of the European Electronic Health Records Exchange format (EEHRxF) across Europe. This pan-European effort will use a “network-of-networks” approach ensuring that digital health actors are motivated and supported by tailored guidance and real examples to help early adopters to advance to the concrete use of EEHRxF embedded digital health solutions to add value to health and care and promote Personal and European Health Data Spaces. XpanDH pursues the main goal of maturing and accelerating a sustainable and scalable interoperability environment for digital health innovations based on the EEHRxF, around 5 Goals: 1) To develop robust technical specifications and resources for the EEHRxF building; 2) To establish the X-Bundle Readiness model; 3) To verify the usefulness of the X-Bundle in real-world with a set of early adopters grouped under selected adoption domains; 4) To mature a pan-European digital health ecosystem of solution providers and end-users, 5) To develop a framework for sustainable ecosystem. The consortium will thrive on past and ongoing eHealth interoperability projects and services, and particularly on the X-eHealth and DigitalHealthEurope projects recommendations, through digital health data activism and strong patient engagement. It brings together 26 Digital Health Actors under a co-creation and co-implementation concept, supported by a Policy Board (linking to Governments and the eHealth Network). To expand its impact, 10 XpandDH networks of hundreds of health stakeholders will be nurtured to form a vibrant pan-European (Digital) Health space converging on common, usable, and reliable tools for real interoperable services that adoption of the EEHRxF and enhance healthcare cooperation for better health towards a European Health Union.