Greek regional public health authority offering real healthcare system access for cybersecurity and digital health research pilots.
The 5th Health Region of Thessaly and Central Greece is a Greek public health authority responsible for healthcare administration, hospital oversight, and public health service delivery across two of Greece's largest administrative regions, headquartered in Larissa. In EU research projects, they function as a real-world pilot environment and end-user validator — bringing direct access to operational healthcare infrastructure, patient populations, and regional health governance. Their participation in SPHINX and SHAPES positioned them as a frontline test bed for cybersecurity tools deployed in live clinical settings and for digital support systems targeting elderly citizens. For consortium partners, they offer something most universities and tech firms cannot: grounded operational reality inside a functioning public health system.
In SPHINX (2019–2022), they contributed to a universal cyber security toolkit for the healthcare industry, with focus areas including medical device certification, vulnerability assessment, honeypots, homomorphic encryption, and blockchain.
In SHAPES (2019–2023), they engaged with smart ageing technology systems focused on community participation, connectivity, interoperability, and AI-enabled health services for elderly people.
As a regional health authority, their core institutional value across both projects is direct access to regulated healthcare operations, clinical environments, and administrative health governance in Greece.
Both SPHINX and SHAPES relied on real healthcare system access for testing and validation — a role only an operating public authority can credibly fill.
Their two H2020 projects both started in 2019, so there is no true multi-year timeline to track — but the thematic contrast between the two is sharp. The SPHINX project focused on the technical security layer: medical device sandboxing, encryption, honeypots, and vulnerability assessment in clinical environments. SHAPES, by contrast, moved into the social and service layer of health: community engagement, interoperability of care platforms, market-shaping for ageing support, and AI-enabled services for elderly people. In effect, they moved from infrastructure security toward citizen-facing digital health — from protecting systems to connecting people.
Their trajectory points toward digital health services for ageing and vulnerable populations — an area of growing EU policy priority — which makes them a natural fit for future projects in the Horizon Europe mission on cancer, healthy ageing, or the European Health Data Space.
They have participated exclusively as consortium partners — never as coordinator — across both projects, which is typical for public health authorities that bring institutional access rather than technical research capacity. Both projects involved large, international consortia, which means they are comfortable operating within complex multi-partner environments. They likely serve a validation and end-user role rather than a technical development one, making them a reliable but non-driving force in any consortium.
Despite only two projects, they have connected with 49 unique partners across 16 countries — a strong indicator that both SPHINX and SHAPES were large-scale international consortia. No geographic concentration is evident beyond the projects themselves.
As a Greek regional public health authority — not a university, not a hospital, not a tech company — they bring something structurally rare in EU consortia: direct institutional authority over a regional healthcare system, with the administrative standing to validate, approve, and deploy technologies within it. For project coordinators needing a Greek public-sector health partner with real operational scope, they are one of the few options that can credibly represent an entire regional health system rather than a single clinic or department. Their involvement also strengthens a project's connection to EU health policy implementation at the regional governance level.
