The European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) is one of the flagship projects of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and a pillar of the European OHDSI community. Together with 21 partners from academia, regulatory bodies, governments, NGOs and industry, The Hyve aims at leveraging the potential of real world data and large-scale analysis to build a federated data network, allowing access to the medical data of EU citizens standardised to the OMOP common data model.
The challenge
The main question addressed by the EHDEN consortium is: How can the huge amount of observational health data and medical history data from EU citizens be leveraged to study patient level and population level health?
How EHDEN is addressing it
The EHDEN consortium addresses this question from five angles: Harmonisation, Federation, Community, Education and Outcomes.
Harmonisation of real world data to a common standard (OMOP CDM) enables federated analysis with the large-scale analytics tools provided by the OHDSI suite. However, scaling these up to a European level is only possible through education and a growing community. The combination of those factors will lead to outcome-driven healthcare improvements on a European level.
Since the available amount of real world data is huge and continues to grow every day, it is impossible for the current EHDEN consortium members to harmonize all data. Therefore, new community members are trained to help realize this ambitious task. Besides training, EHDEN also provides funding for data owners who want to have their data converted to OMOP and to participate in the ever growing federated data network.
Within the consortium, The Hyve is co-leading the technical work package, in which we coordinate design, set up and implementation of the EHDEN infrastructure (e.g. EHDEN portal to identify data sources of interest) and actively improve ETL tools of the OHDSI tool suite. Our OMOP experts are also sharing their knowledge with the community by training other SMEs (small and medium enterprises) on best practises of OMOP conversions.
The Hyve is the lead contributor to the EHDEN deliverable called Roadmap for interoperability solutions, which explains the use of the OMOP CDM in EHDEN and its relation to other biomedical standards, such as i2b2, CDISC, FHIR, openEHR and GA4GH.
The Outcome
Even though the project is still ongoing, already a number of great results can be reported. One of them being the high number of EU citizen’s health records that have been converted to the OMOP CDM and are therefore available for federated analysis. In January 2021, the IMI EHDEN consortium reached 200 million European patient records, doubling the initial project goal.
Besides the growing number of available health records in the OMOP CDM, the rapidly growing community is another success of EHDEN. In 2021, 62 data partners from all over Europe were granted funding to map their data to the OMOP CDM and make it available to the network. To execute the conversion, more than 20 SMEs have been trained by a team of OMOP experts from The Hyve and other organisations in the EHDEN framework.
OHDSI