| abstract: |
Europe is generating huge amounts of patient-level information contained in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and other types of health databases. These include structured data in the form of diagnoses, medications, laboratory test results, etc., and unstructured data in clinical narratives. The Electronic Health Data in a European Network (EHDEN) Consortium leverages these vast volumes of data to improve future clinical practice and individual patient outcomes by increasing our understanding of disease and treatment pathways. EHDEN will galvanize transparent and reproducible analytics that will generate valid real-world evidence to improve patient care, and enable medical outcomes-based research at an unprecedented scale. The EHDEN Consortium provides the infrastructure and eco-system supporting disease-specific projects in the IMI Big Data for Better Outcomes (BD4BO) programme. The core of EHDEN is the use of a common data model (OMOP-CDM), standardised outcome assessment (ICHOM), and transparent open-source analytics (OHDSI). The objective of the EHDEN consortium is to provide all the necessary services that enable a distributed European data network to perform fast, scalable and highly reproducible research, while respecting privacy regulations, local data provenance and governance. This will include services and tools to perform data standardization, analytical pipelines, tools to share study results, and tools for stakeholder engagement and training. The EHDEN Consortium combines active participation of stakeholder representatives with proven experience in: a) integrating different data types, methods and technologies to utilize diverse clinical datasets; b) platform development to make methods and datasets Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR); and c) engaging a wide variety of stakeholders, including health technology assessment agencies, regulators and patients. |
