OHDSI Belgium

Background 

The Belgian OHDSI Node was born spontaneously from the Belgian EHDEN community. After several members expressed their interest to form a Node, we organized a brief poll among Belgian EHDEN data partners, certified SMEs and their networks. This generated a lot of enthusiastic responses, not only from the current community, but also from aspiring data partners and several other stakeholders. In a short time, the Node had been established.

The Belgian OHDSI Node has a flat organizational structure, as it receives no funding and does not aspire to centralize tasks or services. Instead, it empowers its members to contribute to and to take advantage of a thriving Belgian OHDSI community.

The Node members realize that, in order to leverage health data to improve citizen health, we need an enabling foundation that is trustworthy for citizens and offers FAIR data with a clear governance model. Therefore, besides promoting Belgian participation in OHDSI network studies, the Node aims to contribute to a harmonized Belgian health data ecosystem that is aligned with the European OHDSI chapter and the European Health Data Space and specific national legislations. It takes a hands-on approach, focused on getting things done following the OHDSI open-source and open-science principles.

Of note, current focus areas of Node members include multiple sclerosis, oncology, cardiology, hospital claims data and hospital data quality.

Objectives 

• Build a thriving Belgian OHDSI community Including all different stakeholders (citizens, data holders, data users, SMEs)
  
  
• Create visibility and awareness within and beyond the Belgian OHDSI community
  • Serve as a point of contact and matchmaker for OMOP expertise, services or data.
  • Promote inspirational uses cases
    
    
• Keep the Belgian OHDSI community informed
  
  • Communications from EHDEN (e.g. opportunities for study participation)
  • Share best practices
  • Share member activities (e.g. educational workshops)
  • Share funding opportunities
    
    
• Promote technical harmonization
  • Keep track of ongoing OMOP mapping efforts and support each through knowledge leveraging where possible
  • Promote collaboration on harmonized mapping, especially for Belgian terminologies
    
    
• Empower members who work on a specific topic (disease area, terminology, comprehensive use case…) to do so in the context of a dedicated Node working group. This allows them to take advantage of expertise, work on top of each other's efforts (e.g. through sharing open source codes) of other Node members, and accelerates the adoption of progress and alignment of efforts within the community.
  
  
• In the (mid-)long term, depending on the strength of the community and funding, the Node could initiate use cases and organize educational sessions.

Practical Organization  

• Regular meetings of 8-member Core Group, representing different stakeholders
• Yearly plenary Node meeting in summer at the OHDSI Europe annual symposium
• Yearly virtual plenary Node meeting in winter
• Focus meetings depending on working group needs - meeting format, agenda, goals and target audience will be shared beforehand within the Node
• “Teams” channel, where all meeting reports can be consulted
• Quarterly newsletter
• OHDSI Belgium LinkedIn page to stay tuned for upcoming events

Leading Organisation(s)

Hasselt University
Liesbet M. Peeters PhD
Research Group of Biomedical Data Sciences Biomedical Research Institute & Data Science Institute Martelarenlaan 42 - 3500 Hasselt - Belgium
T+32(0)11 26 92 01 (secretariat BIOMED)

University Hospital Antwerp
Annelies Verbiest MD PhD
Department of general medical oncology
Drie Eikenstraat 655 - 2650 Edegem - Belgium T+32(0)3 821 55 70

Organizations with interest in the OHDSI Belgium Initiative

Data Partners 

How to contribute?

To get onboard the OHDSI Belgium Node, please complete this form. If you haven't already done it, please subscribe also the OHDSI Community and the working groups you prefer (IMPORTANT: you need to select at least the "Europe" chapter in section #6 of the form).

You can also contact us directly through our National Node Manager (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)