The aim of Health-RI is to accelerate the development of personalized medicine and health solutions by connecting research data infrastructures. Studying and integrating highly diverse collections of longitudinal biomedical data, generated at different hospitals and research centers in the Netherlands, are required to empower researchers in developing more effective personalized health solutions. These data collections are often fragmented and hard to find. Therefore, Health-RI wants to unlock and interconnect the different biomedical sources available.
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About Health-RI
Health-RI is an innovative and integrated research infrastructure initiated by BBMRI-NL, ELIXIR-NL, EATRIS-NL, NFU, DTL, Lygature, and Health~Holland. This research infrastructure is initiated to connect the existing biomedical research infrastructures in the Netherlands. The ultimate aim of Health-RI is to function as a one-stop-shop for researchers in the personalized health domain and beyond. Health-RI will interconnect biobanks, medical imaging and data collections allowing for mining and linking, and will provide access to facilities and IT solutions. Besides sharing and connecting resources, Health-RI will support research projects with tools as ethical and legal services, methodologies, data management training, protocols and best practices. To ensure the quality and effectiveness of the infrastructure, all resources must be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). By creating the interconnected national Health-RI infrastructure, tools and resources will be at researchers’ fingertips to faster develop novel personalized medicine and health solutions. Visit the Health-RI website for more information about the project.
Connecting health research infrastructures
Lygature is one of the founding partners of the Health-RI project. With its extensive experience in managing complex health infrastructure projects (such as TraIT, PSI and BBMRI-NL) and its excellent program management skills, Lygature is responsible for strategy, program management and communication.
- Strategy. Together with the other founding partners, Lygature initiated Health-RI to interconnect the different research infrastructures and boost innovation in the field of personalized medicine and health. Together with the other partners Lygature is responsible for the strategy of Health-RI.
- Program management. Lygature handles strategic and day-to-day operations including administrative and financial roles. It is responsible for managing and monitoring the program on a day-to-day basis. This includes optimizing internal processes and looking for funding opportunities and collaborations.
- Communication. Lygature is responsible for the communication strategy, stakeholder management and communication tools supporting the Health-RI strategy.
Lygature together with
Project updates
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Meet Health-RI at the Benelux Precision Medicine Forum
The event brings together experts from across industry, research, patient groups, healthcare and more to discuss the latest developments, and act as an aid to facilitate further collaboration – what many agree is one of keys to unlocking the promise of precision medicine. Health-RI is well represented, with Alain van Gool, Gerrit Meijer and Cisca Wijmenga as speakers. Read more
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Hit the ground running in personalized medicine & health research
In its advisory report on Big Data in research involving personal data of May 15th, the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) strongly advises academic researchers who work with personal data to collaborate with data specialists and legal and ethical experts. Health-RI brings good news.
Big data offers new opportunities for research in the Netherlands in a broad range of applications. It also poses new challenges with respect to data accessibility, analysis and storage, as well as raising various legal and ethical issues.
Researchers should develop both cross-disciplinary and discipline-specific methods for dealing with big data. Another KNAW recommendation is that researchers should have easy access to such expertise, preferably embedded in a sound, secure infrastructure within a research institute or faculty.
Good news
To ensure the integration of local data sources and infrastructure, and to facilitate cooperation within the research community as well as with public- and private-sector partners, an overarching infrastructure is required. The good news is that researchers in the health domain do not need to beat around the bush. They can benefit from the Health-RI initiative immediately. It already combines data expertise from partners such as DTL, ELIXIR, BBMRI-NL and the TraIT project with legal and ethical specialists from the BBMRI-NL network. Health-RI is easily accessible for researchers by a single point of contact.
Endorsed by over 85 partners including the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), SURF, and most Dutch health foundations, the Health Research Infrastructure is already well underway so that health researchers can hit the ground running. Read more
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The next step in Health-RI
We are happy to announce that Wiro Niessen joined the managing board of Health-RI.
Gerrit Meijer, Chief Scientific Officer, and Wiro Niessen, Chief Digital Officer, are the scientific leaders of Health-RI. They are supported by Jan-Willem Boiten as Director Operations and Rick van Nuland as Program Manager.
The steering committee transferred the daily management and operations of Health-RI on to the managing board on May 3, 2018. This illustrates the transition of Health-RI, entering a new phase in 2018 and building an operational organization with a definitive governance in line with the business plan. The steering committee members will remain closely associated to Health-RI as key-ambassadors or in other ways. Health-RI is thankful for the time and energy that they dedicated to our shared ambitions. Read more