Health-RI

Overview

Health-RI is the Dutch national integrated health-data infrastructure, established as an independent foundation (Stichting) in 2021 with national government investment. Its purpose is to make health and life-science data across the Netherlands findable and reusable for research, policy, and innovation, so that data held at different hospitals, biobanks, medical imaging collections, clinical registries, and genomics resources can be discovered and combined rather than remaining fragmented. It is co-initiated by BBMRI-NL, ELIXIR-NL (which it hosts), EATRIS-NL, the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), and the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL, since absorbed into its remit), and acts as the umbrella over these national life-science infrastructures. It builds on the FAIR Principles and connects existing Dutch biomedical infrastructures into a single discovery layer.

National infrastructure

Health-RI operates a National Health Data Catalogue that harvests metadata from FAIR Data Points exposed by Dutch data holders, giving researchers a single discovery point for cross-domain health data. The catalogue implements the HealthDCAT-AP metadata standard, making it one of the first operational national health dataset catalogues aligned with the European Health Data Space Regulation, and is designed to be harvestable by the European health data catalogue infrastructure. Health-RI coordinates a network of regional nodes at university medical centres and provides shared services including FAIR data stewardship training, and ethical and legal support. It is one of four partners, alongside DANS, 4TU.ResearchData, and SURF, in the Research Data Netherlands (RDNL) consortium for data-steward training.

Role under the European Health Data Space

Health-RI is the primary national vehicle for preparing the Netherlands for the EHDS, building the Dutch Health Data Access Body (HDAB-NL) that will manage secondary-use access requests under the regulation, with initial obligations due March 2029. Its work aligns with European infrastructure including EOSC and the 1+MG Framework for genomic data.

Connections

• nationalNodeOf: ELIXIR (Health-RI hosts ELIXIR-NL, the Dutch ELIXIR node)
• relatedTo: BBMRI-ERIC (BBMRI-NL, the Dutch national biobank node, is a co-initiating partner and operates under the Health-RI umbrella)
• relatedTo: EATRIS (EATRIS-NL is a co-initiating partner)
• relatedTo: EHDS (Health-RI is building the Dutch Health Data Access Body for secondary use under the regulation)
• relatedTo: EOSC (Health-RI co-designs EOSC as the cross-connecting European FAIR data layer)
• relatedTo: DANS (DANS is responsible for the FAIR health data architecture within Health-RI and is a co-partner in the RDNL consortium)
• implements: DCAT (National Health Data Catalogue implements HealthDCAT-AP, the health-sector DCAT-AP extension)
• relatedTo: FAIR Principles (Health-RI builds its discovery layer on FAIR principles)

Resources

• https://www.health-ri.nl/en
• https://www.health-ri.nl/en/about/organisation/fair-data (FAIR data approach)
• https://www.healthdata.nl/en/data-catalogue/about-catalogue (National Health Data Catalogue)
• https://eosc.eu/members/stichting-health-ri-hri (EOSC Association profile)