EHDEN Launches the 7th, final, Open Call for European Data Partners aiming to receive funding and support in mapping their healthcare data to the OMOP common data model - with EUR1 million budget, in partnership with Health Data Research UK (supporting UK applicants), with up to GBP300,000.
3rd October 2022, Brussels, Belgium: The EHDEN Consortium would like to invite all data custodians of Electronic Health Records, Claims, Hospital and Registry data across Europe to participate in its final open call of the IMI Programme, supporting the mapping of their data to the OMOP common data model. The ambitions of the EHDEN project are high as we are now standardising more than 650 million patient records across Europe from different geographic areas and different data sources. Mapping of healthcare data to the OMOP CDM will facilitate the re-use for a variety of purposes, enhancing and accelerating research and healthcare decision-making for global benefit. EHDEN is delighted to partner with Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) for this last call.
Established in April 2018, HDR UK is the UK’s national institute for health data science (www.hdruk.ac.uk). Its mission is to unite the UK’s health-relevant data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives. It convenes the UK Health Data Research Alliance (https://ukhealthdata.org/) that currently includes over 70 custodians and curators of data, including a network of health data research hubs. HDR UK is also responsible for the development and delivery of the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway (https://healthdatagateway.org/) which provides metadata on over 780 datasets to help data discovery. In November 2021, the Data Officers Group of the UK Health Data Research Alliance published a set of recommendations for Data Standards. One of these recommendations was: “For those custodians who have not adopted a specific data standard/model, HDR UK broadly recommends consideration of the OMOP data model and HL7 FHIRv4 messaging specification standard.” To support the implementation of this recommendation and build on the implementations by the existing 17 UK based EHDEN Data Partners, HDR UK is delighted to be partnering with EHDEN for this Data Partner Call.
Following 6 open calls to date of a series of 7, EHDEN is now working with 166 Data Partners in 26 countries, and following four parallel calls, 64 trained and certified Small-to-Medium Enterprise-sized (SME) companies across Europe who support Data Partners in the mapping of their data to the OMOP CDM. We hope to continue to grow this collaboration throughout the duration of the project.
This is already contributing to scientific outputs with regards to collaborative research studies and study-a-thons, inclusive of COVID-19, responding to the current pandemic. The current call is a general call across therapeutic areas and diverse types of health data. We welcome all applications but applications from countries not yet (or minimally) represented in the EHDEN Network will be especially welcome, as well as datasets with granular data:
- Large, national and regional datasets
- Datasets with granular data will also be especially welcome
- Datasets with longer term follow up, and in-patient data
- Including, but not exclusively Patient Outcomes, e.g., PROs/PREMs/HRQoL
- Including, but not exclusively Claims, resource utilisation
- Including, but not exclusively Registries, small rich datasets
Specific interest for this call (but not exclusively):
- All therapeutic areas will be considered
Data Partners can benefit from up to a maximum of EUR100,000 funding (GBP85,000 in the UK via HDR UK) that will be made available via a EUR15 million EHDEN “Harmonisation Fund” for the duration of the project, and up to GBP300,000 for this call from HDR UK, that subsidises conversions to the OMOP CDM performed by EHDEN-certified SMEs. The current call has a EUR1.34 million combined budget. To find out more about our Harmonisation Fund and how we determine the size of the grants, please go to our Harmonisation Fund page.
By becoming a Data Partner in the EHDEN community you will:
- Facilitate scientific collaboration, and the connection with peers and their learnings by becoming part of a thriving academic/medical network and community.
- Boost opportunities to participate in international studies for larger academic impact.
- Improve interoperability; expand the value of your data by enabling its re-use across a wide range of analytic use cases.
- Receive financial support for uptake, extension and validation of mappings (EHDEN grants).
- Increase visibility for your data, expanding opportunities to be approached for sponsored studies helping long-term sustainability of the data source with stable revenue streams.
- Increase capability for analysis thanks to a host of open-source tools. Quickly and consistently design and perform studies (cohort definition, etc.).
- Increase transparency of analyses and reproducibility, enabling studies to be easily ‘transposed’ to other data sources for multiplied impact (e.g., in publications).
- Perform studies faster.
The Call portal will be live from 12:00 CET Wednesday 12th October to 17:00 CET Friday 11th November.

The current open call will run from October 12th to November 11th 2022, and is the seventh and final call in a continuous series of calls. More information on EHDEN can be found here, and more details on this open call for European Data Partners on our website. The EHDEN Consortium, and HDR UK are looking forward to your potential application and to collaborate with you.