Health-RI

Overview

Health-RI is the Dutch national integrated health-data infrastructure, established as an independent foundation 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, and research centres can be discovered and combined rather than remaining fragmented. It builds on the FAIR Principles and connects existing Dutch biomedical infrastructures, acting as the umbrella over BBMRI-NL (the Dutch BBMRI-ERIC node), ELIXIR-NL, and EATRIS-NL, having absorbed the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL) into its remit.

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. It 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, and is building the Dutch Health Data Access Body (HDAB-NL) that will manage secondary-use access requests under the regulation. Its work aligns with European infrastructure including EOSC and the 1+MG Framework for genomic data.

Connections

• relatedTo: EHDS (Health-RI is building the Dutch Health Data Access Body for secondary use under the regulation)
• relatedTo: BBMRI-ERIC (BBMRI-NL, the Dutch national biobank node, operates under the Health-RI umbrella)
• relatedTo: EOSC (Health-RI co-designs EOSC as the cross-connecting European FAIR data layer)
• implements: FAIR Principles

Resources

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