The official INDICATE Consortium Meeting will take place from 14 to 16 September 2026 in Rome, Italy, hosted by our partner Fondazione Policlinio Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS.

As we reach the halfway point of the project, this meeting will focus on reflection and forward planning. We will review key achievements, such as the first use case going live, as well as the main challenges, including updates on communication and education.

Looking ahead, we will focus on the second half of the project. The sessions will cover upcoming deliverables and milestones, progress on data provider onboarding, and the next steps in establishing the legal entity that will operate the INDICATE infrastructure.


Practical information

Date: 14-16 September

Location: Italy, Rome

Venue: Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS, Largo Agostino Gemelli 8, 00136 Roma, Italy


Register here!

We are pleased to announce that the INDICATE study abstract, “A Multi-Dimensional Assessment Framework for Evaluating AI and Federated Data Training in Intensive Care: The INDICATE Study” has been accepted as an e-Poster at the ESICM LIVES 2026 Congress in Lisbon.

The abstract will be presented by Maria Theodorakopoulou (the Lead of Work Package (WP) 5) during the Data Science 3 session on Wednesday, 14 October 2026, in Lisbon. In addition to the presentation, the abstract will be published in the online supplementary issue of Intensive Care Medicine Experimental, the official journal of ESICM.

This achievement represents an important milestone for WP 5 and reflects the collaborative efforts of all partners who are contributing to the study. Congratulations to everyone involved.

Consortium members attending ESICM LIVES 2026 are encouraged to attend the e-poster presentation and support this important WP5 deliverable. Your presence will help showcase the INDICATE project’s contribution to advancing AI and federated data training in intensive care to the international critical care community.

We look forward to presenting the INDICATE study at ESICM LIVES 2026.

In the OHDSI community, we’ve come a long way together: standardizing health data across hundreds of institutions, building shared tools, and growing a community that spans the globe. The next level is realizing the full value of your CDM: ensuring high-quality, analysis-ready data, robust processes for maintenance and updates, and reliable evidence generation within your organization and in multi-center studies.

This 3-day expert training brings together max. 30 OMOP implementers for an intensive, hands-on programme in the heart of Rotterdam. You’ll work directly with the tools the community has built, including: the Data Quality Dashboard to assess the quality of your CDM; ATLAS and CohortDiagnostics to design and validate phenotypes. We will also guide you through the implementation and execution of a study-design.

Up to five participants can bring their own ETL and, preferably, access to their OMOP CDM for live feedback from faculty and peers. You’ll leave with increased expertise, a deeper and more practical understanding of OMOP tooling and analytics, and concrete improvement pointers to generate reliable evidence and drive adoption within your organization.

The training is delivered by the team of the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC, bringing more than a decade of experience in operationalizing OMOP CDM in Europe through initiatives such as EHDEN, DARWIN EU® Coordination Center, and the OHDSI Europe Coordination Center.

Register now!

• Early bird (before 1 July 2026):  €1,800 per participant excl. VAT
• Standard registration: €2,100 per participant excl. VAT
• Group registration (3+ from same organization):  €1,900 per participant  excl. VAT

On Monday 25 May 2026, Boris Delange (MD, Medical Informatics & Intensive Care, University Hospital of Rennes), presented the INDICATE Minimal Data Dictionary to the European medical informatics community during MIE 2026 (Medical Informatics Europe), held in Genova, Italy (25-28 May 2026). 

On behalf of the INDICATE consortium, Boris presented the INDICATE Minimal Data Dictionary. This is a carefully selected and peer-reviewed list of ICU concepts that is compatible with OMOP and FHIR. It helps clinicians and data scientists use the same language and makes the process of mapping concepts faster and easier. This is an important step for federated ICU research, where data can be used across different locations without being moved.

Boris started with a simple observation: clinicians and data scientists don’t speak the same language. A clinician asks for “total bilirubin”, while a data engineer needs the exact technical definition and the specific codes (LOINC, SNOMED CT, etc.). The INDICATE Data Dictionary provides both, side by side. Concept mapping is hard: a single variable can map to hundreds of candidate codes, so every data provider redoes the same work and often chooses differently – small inconsistencies that can silently bias federated analyses!

Boris presented the dictionary which contains 332 peer-reviewed, ETL-ready concept sets across 9 clinical categories, each linked to both OMOP and HL7 FHIR, using SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNorm and UCUM. Every concept set is versioned, reviewed, and enriched with expert comments – and its quality comes from the diversity of reviewers: a pharmacist, a biologist, an intensivist each catch different issues.

The web application of INDICATE was also shared, this runs entirely in the browser with no install and no login: anyone can browse, search, read the expert comments, and suggest changes in a couple of clicks. It supports both OMOP and FHIR from the start, which is still rare. 

The dictionary is also one of the building blocks of INDICATE’s federated infrastructure, which spans 15 data providers across 12 European countries and 6 clinical use cases.

The MIE is an event attended by researchers, clinicians, data scientists, informaticians and interoperability experts working on health data standardization and federated analytics across Europe – and anyone interested in OMOP/FHIR-based ICU data harmonization.

The INDICATE team from Seville was present as well – notably Carlos Luis Parra-Calderón. The work is a joint effort of the INDICATE Clinical Demonstrations and Common Data Models work packages.

How do we ensure that clinicians, researchers, nurses, legal experts, and data engineers have the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to participate in federated health data research? Today, the INDICATE Training and Education Workgroup met at ESICM in Brussels to discuss one of the most important ingredients for successful federated data research: people.

What did we focus on in Brussels?

• Define tailored learning pathways for different stakeholder groups
• Develop educational onboarding journeys for both data providers and data users
• Identify the skills, competencies, and support structures needed to enable effective participation in federated health data research

Some key takeaways?

• Institutional readiness is just as important as individual readiness
• Clinicians, nurses, researchers, legal experts, and data engineers all have a role to play
• Education should be practical, interactive, and aligned with the stage of onboarding and implementation
• Based on the outcomes of today’s discussions, we will further develop targeted onboarding courses, hands-on workshops, and role-specific learning opportunities.

A recurring theme throughout the meeting was simple: we are here to learn from each other. Thank you to all members of the Training and Education Workgroup for the valuable discussions, insights, and ideas. We look forward to translating these into practical educational pathways that will help make federated health data research a reality across Europe.

Jan van den Brand – Lisanne van Prooyen Schuurman – Marcel Giemsa – Maria Theodorakopoulou – Maarten Ligtenberg – Bert Cappelle – Maaike van Zuilen – Margo van Mol – Elisa Vera – Melania Istrate – Celia Alvarez Romero – Julie Benbenishty

On 21 May, the fourth INDICATE training session brought together participants from across the consortium to explore one of the most critical aspects of data integration: ensuring data quality throughout the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process.

Led by Celia Alvarez Romero and María González-Lopez from the Computational Health Informatics Group at Virgen del Rocío University Hospital, the training focused on practical approaches to data validation, quality assessment, and troubleshooting within the INDICATE data infrastructure.

Participants revisited the process of transforming intensive care data from different hospital systems into common standards that enable information to be shared and analysed consistently across institutions. The discussion highlighted that achieving this requires more than technical tools and data standards. It depends on close collaboration between clinicians, data experts, terminology specialists, and technical teams to ensure that clinical information is accurately represented and can be reused for research and innovation.

A major focus was on data quality assessment. Rather than discussing validation only from a theoretical perspective, participants followed the fictional journey of “Hospital A”, a European hospital preparing to join INDICATE as a data provider. After successfully completing its ETL process and creating a local OMOP instance, Hospital A began evaluating the quality of its transformed data.

Using a series of realistic scenarios, attendees explored common challenges such as missing data, incorrect units, mapping inconsistencies, and implausible values. Together, they discussed the most likely causes of these issues and identified practical solutions.

Participants also reviewed the results of a recent survey among INDICATE data providers across Europe. The findings of this survey are that many hospitals already have strong foundations in place for sharing and secondary use of intensive care data for research purposes. At the same time, the survey highlighted several common challenges, including limited staff capacity for data integration and ETL work, difficulties in achieving interoperability across different hospital systems, and varying levels of maturity in data quality management and validation processes.

One of the central takeaways was that data quality is not a one-time task but an ongoing, collaborative effort. Effective validation requires continuous communication between clinicians, data stewards, ETL developers, and technical experts to ensure that data remains accurate, complete, and fit for federated research and AI applications.

The INDICATE Training programme on Data Model & Data Enablement consists of five sessions. The next and last session will take place on June 17, 14:00–16:00 CEST.