OHDSI Belgium

Summary:

OHDSI Belgium is a national node of OHDSI. The main goal of a national node is to facilitate collaborations on a national level. The node leadership is responsible for reporting node activities back to the European chapter, and for communicating European initiatives back to our national node.

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.

• Mission: to improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care.
• Vision: a world in which observational research produces a comprehensive understanding of health and disease.

Role of UHasselt

• UHasselt is co-founder of the National Node Lead with Liesbet M. Peeters co-chairing the Node together with Annelies Verbiest (UZA) and Ilse Vermeulen being the Node Manager