The EHDEN project is a public-private partnership, set up under the framework of the IMI2 programme (www.imi.europa.eu). The EHDEN consortium consists of twenty-two partners, including academia, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), patient associations, regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical companies. EHDEN is led by the Erasmus Medical Centre, The Netherlands, and Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V., Belgium. The mission of EHDEN is to provide a new paradigm for the discovery and analysis of health data in Europe, by building a large-scale, federated network of data partners across Europe.
Central to EHDEN will be the standardisation of health data to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM), and the utilisation of analytical tools such as those developed by the international Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) open science collaboration (www.ohdsi.org), and others. The ultimate aim is to facilitate the generation of valid real-world evidence to improve patient care and to enable medical outcomes-based research at an unprecedented scale.
The EHDEN consortium will provide the infrastructure and ecosystem to make this ambition come true. The ambitions of the EHDEN project are high. We aim to standardise more than 100 million patient records across Europe from different geographic areas and different data sources, e.g. hospital data, registries, population databases, etc. Standardising such data to the OMOP-CDM will facilitate their use for a variety of purposes, enhancing and accelerating research and healthcare decision-making for global benefit. For this specific COVID-19 call, we are aiming to accelerate meaningful evidence generation for those providing care, managing care, and responding to this pandemic.
Through EHDEN, data custodians of longitudinal, person-level observational health data can benefit from financial support to standardise their data to the OMOP-CDM and locally install the analytical tools. Once the Data Source is standardised and the tools are operational, the Data Partner becomes a member of the EHDEN community and Federated Data Network and can participate in research studies following their own governance rules.
To ensure diversity and representativeness of data in the network, the open calls may include specific priorities, focused on for example certain data source types, geographic locations, or disease areas (as in the current call). Such priorities will be transparently and publicly disclosed as part of the call information published on the EHDEN website.
Due to impending global urgency to provide evidence-based insight into COVID-19 patients, their treatment and prognosis, EHDEN is launching this extraordinary call to invite any institution in Europe holding relevant COVID-19 data to apply in order to contribute to a world-class rapid response research collaboration. Each Data Partner that is willing to map their COVID-19-related data and to contribute such data to our federated studies will be awarded a sub-grant of maximum EUR 50,000 to compensate for their effort in preparing the data and collaborating with EHDEN in both the mapping exercise and subsequent research studies.
The COVID-19 call opens April 16th at 12:00 CET and closes May 14th 17:00 CET.
All applications are to be completed electronically in English through the application portal which is available on the EHDEN Website. https://www.ehden.eu/
More information: https://www.ehden.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID-19-Data-Partner-Call-Description-v1.4.pdf