Towards Fair AI in Healthcare - The Impact of The European Health Data Space on Data Poverty

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform healthcare by facilitating medical diagnosis, prognosis and benefit allocation, it can also entrench harmful biases, perpetuating discrimination suffered by vulnerable patients. This article focuses on one of the leading reasons for algorithmic bias – data poverty, which is understood as limited availability and/or low quality of data concerning vulnerable groups. The article explores the impact of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) proposal on data availability and quality concerns. It argues that while the EHDS constitutes an important step towards remedying data poverty, it must be accompanied by further strategies aimed at the collection of high quality health data concerning vulnerable groups of patients.