Mission & Vision
To improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care.
A world in which observational research produces a comprehensive understanding of health and disease.
OHDSI Values
Why Europe Needs a Coordinating Center
Transparent and reproducible research is a core principle of OHDSI. Achieving this in Europe requires more than shared methods alone. It depends on consistent data standardization, high quality implementations, and sustained coordination across countries. The OMOP Common Data Model has proven its value globally and is increasingly adopted across Europe. The European coordinating center ensures that these efforts are aligned, efficient, and sustainable.
Europe’s health data landscape is highly diverse, with many national vocabularies, data structures, and governance models. Local expertise is needed to map national coding systems and implement OMOP correctly, but many challenges are shared across countries. The European coordinating center helps align national efforts, support coordinated vocabulary and standard maintenance, reduce duplication, and ensure that European data are fit for reuse in multinational studies.
Interest from regulators and policymakers in real world evidence continues to grow, particularly in the context of pharmacovigilance and the European Health Data Space (EHDS). The European coordinating center provides a clear interface between the OHDSI community and European stakeholders, helping translate technical standards into practice and ensuring that implementation experience informs policy development.
National and regional OHDSI nodes are the backbone of OHDSI in Europe, connecting institutions, supporting adoption, and building trust in fragmented landscapes. A European coordinating center connects these nodes, supports education and capacity building, and enables deeper collaboration through shared initiatives, studies, and events such as the annual OHDSI Europe Symposium.
Supporting EHDS Implementation
The European Health Data Space (EHDS) establishes a common European framework for the primary (EHDS1) and secondary use of electronic health data (EHDS2). For secondary use, it creates the legal, governance, and infrastructure conditions needed to enable secure and trustworthy access to health data for research, innovation, policy-making, regulatory activities, and public health.
Within this context, the OHDSI Europe community will support the implementation of EHDS2 by demonstrating the value of the OMOP Common Data Model, standardized vocabularies, and common analytics. These tools and approaches will help make secondary use more interoperable, reproducible, and scalable across data holders and countries. OHDSI Europe will contribute practical know-how, connect national experiences, and promote open, reusable solutions that help translate the ambitions of EHDS2 into an effective real-world research infrastructure.