Author: Irene Gebuis

This week marked the first session of the INDICATE Training Programme, designed to support data providers in using the INDICATE infrastructure effectively, securely, and in a fully standardized way.

The session, guided by moderator Maxim Moinat (Data Engineer, Erasmus MC) and co-moderated by Maarten Ligtenberg (Co-founder Cradeq), provided a solid introduction to key building blocks on the INDICATE onboarding framework, interoperability in complex healthcare data environments and federated data infrastructure and secure data sharing principles.

Jan van den Brand (technical lead INDICATE) highlighted key challenges in ICU clinical decision-making and innovation, driven by fragmented data, a lack of standardized data-sharing agreements, and limited secure infrastructure. He illustrated this using a metaphor: hospitals today resemble a house with different types of power sockets, where every device requires its own adapter to function.

In this analogy, medical and AI software represent the appliances, while hospital systems such as electronic health records and laboratory databases represent the power sources. Without a shared standard, hospitals are often forced to build and maintain these “adapters” themselves, increasing complexity, cost, and operational risk. This underlines the need for shared standards and interoperable data models.

A central theme, introduced by our presenter Boris Delange (Doctor in Medical Informatics, Université de Rennes), was the reality of hospital data: each institution often uses its own “language” to describe the same clinical concepts. This creates significant challenges for interoperability and data integration, while also highlighting the importance of standardization for enabling meaningful reuse of healthcare data in research and innovation. 

Boris also addressed the broader context of Hospital Information Systems and Clinical Data Warehouses, focusing on challenges related to data quality, semantic alignment, and making heterogeneous data usable beyond clinical care. Despite its value, a large proportion of hospital data (97%!) remains underutilized for research purposes.

INDICATE addresses this challenge by developing a federated data infrastructure, where data remains securely stored within its original institution (the data never leaves the hospital) while becoming interoperable and accessible for analysis across organisations  through shared standards.

The training programme consists of five sessions. The next session will take place on April 9, 14:00–16:00 CEST.

The training sessions are organised by Maarten Ligtenberg, Melania Istrate, Elisa Vera, Jan van den Brand, Aliza Bos, Maaike van Zuilen, and Irene Gebuis, a collaboration between Work Packages 1 and 5 and the INDICATE Training and Education Workgroup.

We’re gathered in Brussels for the INDICATE Design Workshop – a two-day event bringing together hospitals, technical experts, clinicians and communication advisors from across Europe. INDICATE is building a federated data infrastructure for intensive care data. That means: collaborating on better care and research, without patient data ever leaving a single hospital.

Day 1 ‘Understanding the data provider journey’

• Jan van den Brand walked us through the INDICATE mission – why federated ICU data matters for European healthcare and also through the Onboarding Blueprint – the journey from commitment to production
• Bert Cappelle gave a detailed and inspiring live demo on how to conduct a study with federated data within the INDICATE platform

The afternoon was hands-on: data providers and guests worked through a stakeholder mapping exercise, identifying who is needed to implement INDICATE within a hospital and whether those stakeholders can actually be named today. This was followed by a data provider gap analysis focused on for example identity and access management.

This year we are making the shift from concept to implementation in real hospital environments. That takes collaboration, honesty about challenges, and a willingness to learn from each other. And that’s what we did today!

Day 2 ‘What does it actually take to onboard a hospital as a data provider?’

During day 2 of the INDICATE Design Workshop we spent the day working through what it actually takes to onboard a hospital as a data provider: not in theory, but in practice. 

What does the onboarding journey look like? What do data providers need to implement INDICATE in their organisation, who to get involved? During the day we challenged ourselves to rethink the onboarding process and follow up steps from a data provider perspective – At the end of the day, all attending data providers had developed an actionable implementation roadmap for the next three months. 

One principle that kept coming back: patient data never leaves the hospital. That’s not just a technical design choice, it’s the foundation of trust that makes the federated data network possible.

Next meeting? On Monday March 30 the INDICATE Training Programme on Data Enablement & Data Model will start! We look forward to welcoming you to the session!

Thanks to all who actively participated in person and online!

Celia Alvarez-Romero (Servicio Andaluz de Salud), Marcel Giemsa (Universitätsklinikum Düsseldorf), Bert Cappelle (UZ Gent), Christian Jung (Universitätsklinikum Düsseldorf), Kirsten Colpaert (UZ Gent), Maurizio Cecconi (ESICM), Anouk Kruiswijk (KPMG), Maaike van Zuilen (Erasmus MC – philogirl), Maarten Ligtenberg (Cradeq), Daniel Laxar (Medical University of Vienna), Maria Theodorakopoulou (Hellenic Society of Intensive Care Medicine (HSICM), Maurice Walny (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin), Joost Schotsman (UMC Utrecht), Rachit Gupta (KPMG), Maxim Moinat (Erasmus MC), Irene Gebuis (philogirl), Alexander Lang, Nils Woge, Kai Marten Vogl, Daniel Wetzler, Lorenz Kapral, Natalja Zilinski.

On 5 March 2026, INDICATE hosted a hybrid round table in Düsseldorf, bringing together experts from across Europe for an active exchange between clinicians, researchers, and technical experts working on data-driven healthcare. The day was moderated by INDICATE PI’s Michel van Genderen from Erasmus MC and Christian Jung from Universitätsklinikum Düsseldorf.

The event featured presentations from leading initiatives, including:

• INDICATE – Jan van den Brand (Technical Lead INDICATE)
• Num SN CritCare – Patrick Meybohm
• NUM Rapid – Falk von Dincklage
• Irish Critical Care Clinical Trials Network – Bairbre McNicholas
• Genome of Europe – Jeroen van Rooij

Each project shared its objectives, current progress, and key lessons learned. 

Key topics included:

• Building federated platforms for cross-hospital research
• Ensuring secure, privacy-by-design data sharing
• Governance and legal frameworks for multi-institutional studies
• Interoperability and data harmonization across systems

Insights

Federated infrastructures are increasingly viable, but challenges remain around data standards, governance, and coordination. Synthetic data environments and shared governance models are helping build trust while enabling large-scale research and AI development.

The round table was a valuable forum for sharing experiences, identifying challenges, and exploring future European collaborations in health data research.

On 5 March, Luis Martín-Villén (Head of ICU), Carlos Luis Parra-Calderón (Head of Technological Innovation), Celia Alvarez-Romero, María González-López, María Parra-Rodríguez-Armijo, Paloma Bravo-del-CID, and Paco Rey-Garduño (Computational Health Informatics Group) from Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío and part of the INDICATE consortium, presented an INDICATE poster at the XXII Researchers’ Forum, organised by the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville.

The forum offered a great space for researchers from the hospital to exchange ideas and showcase their work. Our poster highlighted INDICATE’s main goal: developing a European federated infrastructure for ICU data. This approach enables collaborative research without physically sharing sensitive information, improves clinical data quality, and supports evidence-based decision-making.

Key topics included the federated infrastructure model, ICU data harmonization, and the hospital’s strategic role within the European network. As a follow-up, clinical and technical alignment for local implementation of the common data model was proposed.