EHDEN Foundation

EHDEN’s five-year IMI 2 phase will end in 2024. We are proud of the progress of the project to date, achieving beyond our original aims in the build of the Data Partner network, infrastructure development, evidence generation, and education by our midpoint. EHDEN has created a growing network currently consisting 187 Data Partners in 29 countries across the European region, with greater than 850 million anonymous health records being harmonised to the OMOP common data model. In parallel, 64 small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been trained across 22 countries, certified and are working with Data Partners on a consistent data harmonisation process of their source data.

Our evidence-generation work is accelerating and we have contributed to over 70 publications to date, with increasing scientific exposure through international meetings and via OHDSI. The EHDEN Academy has supported over 4,000 participants with its now 19 courses since its launch, and we continue to expand our educational activities, also via the OHDSI Education Working Group.

For the remainder of the project, we want to leverage these achievements and focus even more on evidence generation. Our vision remains the same: a Europe where harmonised real-world data is used by the healthcare community to more rapidly generate high quality insights that improve outcomes for patients, revolutionising how treatment and care are implemented and evaluated.

Building on EHDEN’s successes, a new legal entity, the EHDEN Foundation, was created in The Netherlands. It will serve to transition the project into a long-term, sustainable operation in 2024 — and will facilitate the developing ecosystem, operationalising the research operating model post project, working in parallel on the transition and cross-fade between the project and the EHDEN Foundation.

As a sustainable entity, the EHDEN Foundation will continue to promote and foster a strong and growing open science community with Data Partners, SMEs, researchers, public & private, and NGOs. It will also continue to provide research, training certification, and service research in the EHDEN network and wider research community, supporting studies, study-a-thons, methodological and technical developments, and research programmes.

Watch this space for further updates as we develop the EHDEN Foundation and ensure a smooth sustainability path beyond the original EHDEN project — and we look forward to collaborating with many of you in doing so!