Our experts

International

Health-RI aims to provide the infrastructure to make health data in The Netherlands reusable at scale for research and innovation. Having joined forces with Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL) in the Netherlands, the scope and expertise of Health-RI has expanded to include the broader life sciences.

Health-RI and its users operate in an international research and health data community where infrastructure solutions should work seamlessly across borders. These solutions are increasingly developed in large European or even global collaborations.

The International Team of Health-RI establishes and maintains the cross-border collaborations through the following activities: 1) adopt and align solutions for health data research infrastructure; 2) initiate strategic, technological, legal and policy discussions; 3) improve interoperability and 4) promote sustainable solutions. We act as a health-data broker to identify and stimulate new opportunities for collaboration with European projects and other business collaboration models.

Partnerships with ESFRIs

European Research Infrastructures established as part of the European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) are organisations that deliver integrated scientific solutions for Europe and strengthen its international outreach. EU countries can join ESFRI organisations as member for each infrastructure.

Health-RI aims to be the linking pin across ESFRI organisations and support a smooth collaboration with relevant life-sciences research communities in the Netherlands and beyond. We focus on connecting European initiatives related to data, biomaterials, and images, specifically concerning human health and life sciences. In line with our areas of expertise, Health-RI hosts Dutch National Coordinating Nodes for the following ESFRI organisations:

As activities evolve, we foresee that more ESFRI organisations from other areas of expertise will partner up with Health-RI to stimulate cross-theme, cross-border collaboration on a larger scale.

Visit de page European collaborations for more information.

What and how we do: deliver theme-specific solutions across ESFRIs

Together with the ESFRI organisations, Health-RI focuses on delivering solutions in the following four themes.

The Framework of Ethical, Legal, Societal Implication Framework (ELSI) for solutions in ELSI strategy, ELSI compliance-by-design, ELSI support.
FAIR: to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
Biobanks and Data collection: Provides procedures, guidelines, and standards; offer support& services for data sharing and promote dissemination of knowledge.
Architecture: enables users to find and interpret health data, obtain responsible and secure access to health data, process and analyze health data and unambiguously return results for reuse.

Our stakeholders

The main stakeholders with whom we are working are university medical centers, universities, private research organizations, national ministries and funders.

On the European level, we engage actively with many closely interwoven strategic initiatives such as

European Health Data Space (EHDS), enabling health data sharing across European borders will become mandatory once the EHDS is officially implemented as a European regulation. Health-RI is deeply involved in setting up the Dutch hub (Health Data Access Body) in this EHDS ecosystem for secondary use of health data, for research & innovation. See our dedicated EHDS page for backgrounds and updates on recent developments.
European Open science Cloud (EOSC): aims to provide European researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services. The EOSC mission coincides with Health-RI activities.
1+ Million Genomes: aims to enable secure access to large quantities of genomics data and the corresponding clinical annotations across Europe for better research, personalized healthcare and health policymaking.

Funding opportunities

The International team of Health-RI monitors European programs for funding opportunities in the domain of life-sciences data and biomaterial infrastructure, as well as data-intense research using these infrastructure solutions. As a result, Health-RI actively participates in various research consortia but also aims to create opportunities for partners from the Dutch research ecosystem to join these consortia.

Examples of currently running European projects with strong Health-RI participation: