Between 13 October and 15 November, the EHDEN consortium held its fifth open call for Data Partners. We are thrilled to announce that the response to the call has greatly exceeded our expectations as eighty-nine applications were received – a new record! These applicants cover twenty-four different countries throughout Europe, including four countries new to the network (Ireland, Lithuania, Montenegro & Ukraine).
It’s tremendous to see that while we are already working with ninety-eight Data Partners, in 23 countries, from our first four open calls, the interest to join the network remains particularly high.
The current call has a €3 million budget and there was a specific preference towards applications from countries not yet (or minimally) represented in the EHDEN network. Datasets with granular data on rare/autoimmune/inflammatory disease; cancer therapies and registries (small, rich datasets); and medical devices were of specific interest.
Following an eligibility and completeness check, our independent Data Source Prioritisation Committee (DSPC) is now reviewing these applications. We hope to have the final selection of Data Partners from the current call by mid-December and look forward to finalising the linking of these Data Partners with our forty-seven certified SMEs earlier in 2022.
“Having such a response to our 5th Data Partner call is truly gratifying and we’re looking forward to collaborating with the successful applicants. It’s a tremendous boost to our already large and diverse community of Data Partners across the European region, and following mapping to the OMOP common data model, will build significantly on our goal to broaden the number of open science research programmes with them,” said Prof. Dani Prieto Alhambra, University of Oxford, EHDEN Research Coordinator.
“This unprecedented number of applications underscores the remarkable interest from a wide range of data sources to become Data Partners in a federated network. Such an expansion brings extra geographic depth to the network, and will also bolster the adoption of the OMOP common data model, which, in turn, fosters more studies that will lead to improved treatments for patients across the region,” said Peter Rijnbeek, Coordinator for the EHDEN Project & Associate Professor, Health Data Science at Erasmus Medical Center, The Netherlands.