Nowadays, the big and fast increasing healthcare data their ever-growing exploitation potential prove the importance of data in modern healthcare. A six-fold increase in total data volume (from 153 Exabyte to 985 Exabyte; 1 Exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes) is expected in a good half-decade (2013-2020). Parallel with this development, similar trends have emerged in all fields of the healthcare sector and biomedicine as well. Impressive valuable results in research and innovation clearly demonstrate that the potential of data analysis and utilization goes far beyond the optimization of patient care and health services. In this context, it is also worth mentioning that the pathomechanism of most diseases is complex, i.e. it depends on a variety of factors (cf. ‘Genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger’, F. Collins, 2010), which also underlines the importance of data in the understanding diseases and the development of new therapies. Exploiting all these opportunities, information technology, data science and technology need to meet new challenges from data collection through the development of new types of analytical tools and methods. In the past few years, health policy in Hungary has recognized all these trends and made progressive steps to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of patient care and health care services through health data utilization. Of the actions, the establishment of the National Electronic Health Service Space (‘EESZT’; https://www.eeszt.gov.hu/) can be mentioned as an excellent example. Although, this experience shows that this path should be further pursued in the interest of modern patient care and prevention, utilization of data in R&D&I areas of domestic healthcare and health industry is also very important and forms additional important conceptual and practical tasks.