The EHDEN Symposium, held on October 10 in Barcelona, has marked the end of the six-year EHDEN IMI 2 project that will be transformed into the EHDEN Foundation. This two-day event brought together members of the EHDEN consortium to celebrate the achievements of the project and lay the foundations for the future maintenance and expansion of the network that used medical data to advance European healthcare.
In addition to Heliant, academic institutions led by the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, pharmaceutical companies, some technology companies and public NGOs participated in the symposium.
What is EHDEN?
EHDEN (European Health Data & Evidence Network) is part of the OHDSI movement, which focuses on open health data, science and information technology. The project started in November 2018 with the financial support of the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which is a private-public partnership.
EHDEN aims to solve the challenges of generating insights from real-world clinical data to support patients, healthcare professionals, regulators, governments and industry to better understand the benefits they can have, as well as the course of disease, treatment, outcomes and new therapeutic technologies and devices.
During the project, from 2019 to 2023, out of 563 institutions that applied for funding, 187 “data partners”, mostly healthcare facilities, received funds to standardize their medical data according to the OMOP CDM model.
Among them are important healthcare centres from Serbia and Montenegro, such as the University Clinical Centre of Serbia, the University Clinical Centre Niš, the Zvezdara Clinical Hospital Centre, the Zemun Health Centre and the Clinical Centre of Montenegro, which otherwise use the information systems of the company “Heliant”.
Contribution of small and medium-sized enterprises
In addition to healthcare facilities, an important role in the project was cast to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which underwent all the necessary trainings for ETL processes, and/or data transformation into OMOP CDM. A total of 64 companies from 22 European countries have successfully passed the certification, including “Heliant”, which has been a certified ETL service provider since 2021.
Filip Maljković, head of the development team of the company “Heliant”, participated as a panellist at the symposium, presenting the SME certification and the contribution of the company “Heliant” to the digital transformation of the health system in Serbia.
Maljković’s presence at the panel on training within the EHDEN ecosystem further emphasizes the importance of cooperation between technology companies and healthcare facilities in the process of data standardization.
Panels and Key Topics
On the first day of the symposium, which was reserved only for the participants of the EHDEN project, the history of the project and the main milestones were discussed, including the network that now includes data from over 360 million patients across Europe, the observational studies of medical data conducted, the technical tools developed…
On the second day, which was open to the public, representatives of the European Medicines Agency and IHI (Innovative Health Initiative) spoke, and there were also panels on the use of real-world data and evidence (Real World Data and Real World Evidence) for decision-making in healthcare.
They also discussed future directions through the DARWIN EU initiative and the EHDEN Foundation, which is based in the Netherlands. It will aim to continue working on some of the tasks of the original EHDEN project and to maintain and expand the network of data partners, certified small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and interested professionals, so that medical data generated during clinical work can be used as much as possible for healthcare-related decision-making.