Virtual meetings with decision-makers: an opportunity for engagement with Big Buyers Working Together

The Big Buyers Working Together community has kicked off a series of virtual meetings with decision-makers to discuss EU developments in areas not directly connected to procurement, but still relevant to public buyers. 

The first webinar in the series, which took place in June, was dedicated to the topic of EU Data Spaces. The Data Spaces are EU-supported ecosystems providing sector-specific data infrastructures with a particular focus on interoperability, enabling stakeholders’ access to and (re-)use of data in a secure, fair, and transparent way. A total of 14 Data Spaces are currently active or under development, covering sectors as diverse as mobility, finance, skills, and agriculture.

A Public Procurement Data Space also exists, launched in September 2024 with the goal to create a federated data ecosystem fed by information collected in national and regional portals across the EU. This will help capture more granular information about public contracts at different levels of governance, also including contracts below EU thresholds. 

The platform is built around four layers of data collection and processing: the data sources layer, collating various datasets; the integration layer, where a single, harmonised dataset is created; the analytic layer, where data analysis and the creation of KPIs are performed; and finally the creation of publicly-available user interfaces to access the data.

Once fully functional, this Data Space will represent a valuable resource for public buyers, enhancing their capacity through access to real-time information and thus enabling benchmarking, knowledge-sharing, and better informed decision-making at different stages of the procurement process.

However, other Data Spaces can be useful for public buyers beyond this most immediately relevant one. An example of this was provided by a deep-dive on the EU Healthcare Data Space (EHDS), which created a single market for electronic health records systems, supporting both their primary and secondary use. The latter covers access to the relevant datasets for activities contributing to public health, policy-making, statistics compilation, and for educational or research purposes, as well as the improvement of healthcare services. 

Where useful for their work, therefore, public buyers can be secondary users of the datasets held by this Data Space. Given the generally sensitive nature of health-related data, all requests are submitted to a national Health Data Access Body (HDAB) in charge of issuing data permits and publishing dataset catalogues. All Member States are under an obligation to designate an HDAB by March 2027 (examples of confirmed HDABs include Findata, the French Health Data Hub, and the Luxembourg National Data Service).

The next instalment of the virtual meetings series will be dedicated to the Net Zero Industry Act and its implications for public buyers. Registration for the session, which will take place on Tuesday 7 October at 14.00 CEST, is open at this link.