A big day for INDICATE in Brussels: Wednesday 25 June was a great day for communication and collaboration. Workpackage 5 of INDICATE started the morning with a productive meeting about communications, and in the afternoon, a delegation of INDICATE, including Maurizio Cecconi – Maria Theodorakopoulou – Margo van Mol and Joel Alexandre, met with members of the European Parliament.
INDICATE was highlighted as a strong example of what European collaboration and innovation can look like in healthcare. Our approach to building a federated data platform enables us to share knowledge across borders, support AI development, and still protect patient privacy, which is a crucial balance in today’s data-driven world.
As Maurizio put it: “Research is essential to improving patient outcomes, but without sharing information, we cannot progress. By building a Federated Data Platform and opening it up on a European level, we can safeguard patient privacy while still sharing valuable knowledge that benefits clinicians, researchers, and patients alike. To truly unlock the power of AI and innovation in intensive care, we must share data not only across Europe, but potentially on a global scale, always with privacy and trust at the core.”
It was encouraging to see genuine interest from both European Parliament and Commission representatives. We’re proud to be part of this conversation and part of a project that shows how responsible innovation in AI can move healthcare forward.
Christian Jung, coordinator of the European INDICATE project, represented our European consortium on Thursday 26th of June at the 3CT Workshop in Washington, DC. The 3CT (Critical Care Clinical Trialists) Workshop is an international think tank focused on clinical research in intensive care.
Participants, including intensivists, pulmonologists, cardiologists, emergency physicians, clinical trialists, principal investigators and statisticians from academia, R&D pharma, NIH, EMA, FDA and PMDA, come together to discuss trial design, implementation, ethics, and data interpretation.
The 2025 edition of the meeting, held June 26 – 27 at the French Embassy in Washington, addressed shared challenges in the field of critical care research.
Through Christian’s participation, INDICATE was able to present its work about the importance of federated data in intensive care on a global stage and engage in valuable discussions with key stakeholders from academia, industry, and regulatory bodies.
My name is Lisanne van Prooyen Schuurman. I started my career as a PhD student at Erasmus MC and later transitioned to the Datahub, where I currently work as Operations Manager. In addition to this role, I serve as Project Manager for INDICATE. I also lead the coordination of other grant applications that are written or supported by the Datahub.
What am I up to during INDICATE?
I am the Project Manager of INDICATE. My main responsibility is to oversee the day-to-day coordination of the project, ensuring that timelines are met and deliverables are completed on time and at the right quality. I act as the central point of contact for consortium members, answering their questions or connecting them with the appropriate person within the project. I also handle communication with the European Commission (EC), monitor compliance with EC obligations, and ensure all required reporting and documentation is organized and submitted accordingly. In this role, I support the project’s Principal Investigators Michel van Genderen and Christian Jung in fulfilling their responsibilities under the grant agreement, and I work closely with Jan van den Brand, the project’s Technical Lead, who manages the project’s content.
What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?
As a researcher, I have personally experienced how crucial data availability is for conducting meaningful research, but also how challenging it can be to access data, especially across hospital boundaries. At the same time, I see a constant wave of new technical innovations and tools that could truly improve healthcare, but whose potential remains untapped due to data inaccessibility. I see INDICATE as a unique opportunity to take a first step in changing this. Starting with the ICU (a critical domain in light of aging populations and potential future pandemics) I believe this project lays the foundation for a larger, scalable data infrastructure that can unlock the value of health data across Europe.
What do I expect to accomplish within INDICATE?
Personally, I hope to successfully guide the project toward a strong and impactful result, where cross-border data is made accessible to various end users: researchers, clinicians, nurses, start-ups, governments, and more. I want to ensure every consortium partner feels heard and involved, and to serve as the “spider in the web” connecting all the fantastic 150 members from 30 different institutions who are contributing to this effort. I am confident that with this incredible team, we will have a fully functional infrastructure by 2028, complete with the governance mechanisms required to continue growing and evolving beyond the project’s end.
How does my background or expertise contribute to the goals of INDICATE?
With a background in econometrics, I’m comfortable working with data and analytics. Combined with my hands-on research experience in a hospital setting, this gives me a solid understanding of both the necessity and complexity of the INDICATE project. It allows me to engage with the content, contribute to discussions, and grasp the broader context. In my role as Project Manager, this helps me ask the right questions and make meaningful connections across the six work packages. This is something I see as essential for navigating the interdependencies in such a large and multidisciplinary project.
I am a Surgeon and an Intensive Care Specialist and Head of the Intensive Care Department at General Hospital “KAT” a Trauma Center in Athens Greece. I have studied and trained in Canada, UK and Greece and hold degrees in Biology, Medicine, Public Health and a PhD in Medicine and Clinical Research. I have been working in Intensive Care units since 1999. I am presently the President of the Hellenic Society of Intensive Care Medicine (HSICM) and the Treasurer of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM).
What am I up to during INDICATE?
For the INDICATE project, my colleagues from the EIT HEALTH and the CRADEQ teams with the endorsement of the ESICM and I are leading Work Package 5 (WP5), which focuses on Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication of the project’s outputs to the relevant target groups and stakeholders including data providers, data users, service providers, healthcare workforce, systems and public authorities.
While obtaining my MSc and PhD degree (both at KU Leuven) I studied sleep; my research is captured in the book “Back and Bed” and has resulted in several patents and spinoff companies. I have been advising the Flemish minister of Science, Innovation and Economy, and have been instrumental in setting up public-private institutions both at the regional, national and international level (such as Leuven Health Technology Centre and EIT Health). As a professor at Maastricht University (valorization of research) I obtained an MBA (Vlerick Business School) and joined EIT Health, as Director of Strategy and later as Director Business Development (Belgium-Netherlands), with a focus on digital health.
For the INDICATE project, my colleagues from EIT Health and I are working on a Business Model to make INDICATE (financially) sustainable in the long term (Work Package 3) and on Education (Work Package 5).
What I particularly like about INDICATE, is the hands-on pragmatic approach to advance patient-centred care, by sharing and using data, and the multinational consortium of different organisations and people that will make it happen.
I’m Maarten Ligtenberg and the co-founder of Cradeq along with Bram van Dalen. The objective of Cradeq is to promote understanding and purpose in professional practice by stimulating collaboration on sharing both education and knowledge among health care institutions. To that end we develop and implement web applications for education and information management with a specific focus on medicine and data science.
Within INDICATE as Cradeq we are mainly responsible for the development of educational material, infrastructure onboarding training, and documentation. We do this in close collaboration with the team members of Work Package 5 Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication. Aiming to ensure the effective, correct, and secure use of the INDICATE infrastructure by all different kinds of end users.
P.S. Did you know that “INDICATE” literally means “towards making known”? That’s precisely what we strive to do – make data and outcomes known to advance patient-centered care.
