End of September: INDICATE Design Workshop in Rotterdam at KPMG – lots of bright minds in the room thinking about how we can advance patient-centered care and promote the use of Intensive Care data by developing and implementing responsible and trustworthy AI models.
One of the AI use-cases discussed was the model to predict sepsis using ai on the neonatal intensive care department. The main goal is to develop and validate a continuous prediction model which detects late onset neonatal sepsis before symptoms occur.
Other AI use-cases discussed are the atlas of anonymous acute care cases covering infectious diseases, cancer, heart diseases, and brain injury, the early detection of organ failure, and a digital twin for mechanical ventilation.
As you can imagine, when developing these use-cases, a fine balance is needed between innovation and dealing with sensitive data of patients.
Get ready for the Indicate Plateau 2 Workshop — three days to kick-off design phase for INDICATE infrastructure ‘Plateau 2’
Location: KPMG office, Rotterdam, Weena 650 Start date & time: Wed, Sept 24 at 12:00 CET (including lunch) End date & time: Fri, Sept 25 at 18:00 CET (including drinks)
Costs: Travel and accommodation costs should be covered by each partner individually (INDICATE budget).
Join us for the INDICATE Consortium Meeting, where each Work Package (WP) will give a brief update on progress, challenges, and next steps. Instructions for preparing your WP update will be shared in advance.
Date: October 28, 2025 Time: 15:30–17:00 Location: online
This is a great chance to connect with other consortium members, share insights, and coordinate upcoming activities.
Online links and access details will be provided closer to the meeting.
Healthcare institutions possess vast amounts of untapped data that could drive innovation and improve patient outcomes. As much as 97% of health data world-wide is not re-used. With INDICATE we aim to unlock this potential by building a federated data infrastructure for Intensive Care Units (ICUs) across Europe.
But how can you analyze data without accessing it directly? The answer lies in INDICATE’s design, specifically in its first development phase due for delivery in August 2025.
INDICATE’s federated analysis architecture enables data users, such as researchers, innovators, and policy makers, to derive insights from ICU data across multiple institutions, regions, and European countries.
Work Package 5 in Brussels with European Parliament
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.
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.”
INDICATE represented at international 3CT Workshop in Washington, DC
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.
We’re excited to welcome Arie as the Principal Architect for our European data infrastructure project, INDICATE! His experience as Cloud Architect & Lead Architect with complex, large-scale data environments is a tremendous asset to INDICATE.
The high level design for the MVP phase of INDICATE has been finalized. This design brings together much of the work of the last couple of months. The teams of WP2, WP3, and WP4 are now working hard to implement it through a minimal set of data according to the OMOP CDM, Standard Operating Procedures and templates for important documents, such as Data Sharing Agreements and Study Definitions, and the applications and infrastructure to support federated studies on real-world data. After having seen the first demos we are very excited and look forward to share more with all of you in the months to come!
D3.1: ELSI Framework of INDICATE
The INDICATE project is developing European system that allows hospitals’ intensive care units to securely access patient data for medical research without compromising privacy. It is a network where hospitals can collaborate on research by asking questions about patient trends and outcomes, but the actual sensitive patient information never leaves the original hospital. Only anonymous, aggregated answers are shared.
The ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications) framework is rulebook that ensures this data sharing happens safely, legally, and ethically across different European countries with varying regulations. This framework addresses the complex web of European data laws (like GDPR), establishes clear contracts between participating hospitals, implements privacy-by-design principles, and creates governance structures to oversee the entire system. The ultimate goal is to enable life-saving medical research that can improve intensive care treatments across Europe.
Lisanne van Prooyen Schuurman
Erasmus MC
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.
Hellenic Society of Intensive Care Medicine (HSICM)
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.
Maurizio Cecconi is an anesthesiologist, intensive care specialist, and Chair of Anesthesia and Intensive Care Units at Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy. He is the Vice Scientific Director for Clinical Research, and the Vice President of the joint Medicine-Bioengineering degree “MEDTEC School” at Humanitas University in Milan.
He studied in Italy (University of Udine), Spain (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), the UK (St George’s University of London), and the USA (Harvard Medical School), He worked for 14 years as an NHS Consultant UK, before joining Humanitas in Milan, Italy in 2018. He has authored more than 450 peer-reviewed articles and an H-Index of 95. His research focuses on improving outcomes in perioperative care, data science and artificial intelligence, and the physiology of shock, acute respiratory failure, and sepsis.
He is the Past President of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, which he led through the COVID-19 pandemic. He designed and directed the EU-funded C19_SPACE training course, which provided 20,000 healthcare workers with practical training in record time during the pandemic. He is part of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign and has collaborated with WHO on the COVID-19 and Influenza Clinical Guidelines.
In 2018, the Italian president nominated him Knight of the Order of Merit (O.M.R.I) of the Italian Republic. For INDICATE, he collaborates with WP5 and leads the work related to INDICATE at his University.
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 am Julie Benbenishty I work as a nurse with a PhD degree in an ICU in Jerusalem Israel. I am an educator, clinician and researcher. In addition, I am the deputy chair of the European Federation of Critical Care Nurses.
With all of the above experience, I am working in WP5 Dissemination, Exploitation, and Communication with my colleagues to promote the INDICATE project and develop educational modules for clinicians and researchers to be able to learn about and utilize INDICATE data to it’s best advantage. In every aspect of the development of the INDICATE project, I try to include nurses, nursing data and research so the nurses’ voice can be heard. My goal is to achieve as much nursing exposure to INDICATE as possible.
I am an expert in health innovation and communication. I currently focus on the visibility of EIT Health’s education portfolio; I do market and audience research to understand how to best design and implement a new marketing strategy.
I have over 10 years of experience in communication and quality management of healthcare projects at regional, national and European levels. I am committed to social change and collaboration. You can always talk to me about women empowerment, patient centre health innovations, worldwide cuisine, and dancing.
What am I up to during INDICATE? Together with the WP5 team I support the implementation of different communication and education strategies, such as the organization of Hackathons/Datathons and design of educational programs. In addition, as EIT Health we bring in a network of European partners and engage with the broader European health ecosystem.
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.
I am Margo van Mol. With a background as ICU nurse, including 25 years of clinical experience, and educated as health psychologist, I currently work as assistant professor. My research interests focus on the emotional impact of critical illness on patients and their relatives and developing (digital) interventions to support them during and after an ICU treatment.
For INDICATE, I contribute in WP5 Dissemination, Exploitation, and Communication from my role as chair of Nurses & Allied Healthcare Professionals committee of ESICM (2024-2026). I expect to help bridging a discrepancy in what ICU nurses know about data sharing and what is possible to improve the quality of their work. I find it essential to develop nursing data on-boarding and education on digital skills that goes beyond the already established basic competencies.
European Federation of Critical Care Nurses Endorsed by: ESICM
Alicia San José, RN, PhD, is a distinguished nursing professional with a global perspective shaped by years of clinical experience in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Sweden. Certified sworn translator (English/French), Dr. San José is an effective communicator and advocate for high-quality healthcare within an international environment.
A passionate educator and researcher, Dr. San José is committed to advancing nursing practice through innovative curricula, simulation-based learning, and impactful international collaborations. Dr. San José is a board member of the European Federation of Critical Care Nurses (EfCCNa).
As a participant in the INDICATE project, a pan-European initiative to create a federated infrastructure for ICU data, Dr. San José contributes to Work Package 5 (Dissemination, Exploitation, and Communication), focusing on data user on-boarding, provision of digital skills training, and educational resources.
Her expertise in nursing education, research, and international collaboration is essential to realizing INDICATE’s vision of a data-driven healthcare ecosystem.
Date: September 11, 2025 – September 12, 2025 Location: Hilton Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to impact society in various and profound ways. It is inevitable that health care will face significant changes through the introduction of AI systems that are intended to support the health care system with diagnosis, treatment decision-making, hospital management, medical research and development, nursing care, and the health infrastructure (homecare, insurance etc.) more broadly.
The conference ‘Responsible AI in Health Care’ will clearly map how the introduction of AI in medicine unfolds, which aspects of the health care systems will be impacted most, and how this impact will unfold. First and foremost, it intends to discuss in depth, the question how to shape this transition in a responsible way.
Do you have a special request? Would you like to share news or a publication? Would you like to be (digitally) connected to a certain person? Did you speak or went to an event related to INDICATE or INDICATE-subjects? Please feel very welcome to share your questions or input with: info@indicate-europe.eu
When sharing your news, please make sure to attach your photos/images or figures and always make sure when people are visible, you have their permission to use the pictures.
Below with the format you can use to share your news with us:
What is the purpose of your news?
What title can we use?
Who attended (names, roles, if related to INDICATE meetings/events)?
What were the main topics discussed or key findings?
Were any follow-up actions or appointments agreed upon?
Healthcare institutions possess vast amounts of untapped data that could drive innovation and improve patient outcomes. As much as 97% of health data world-wide is not re-used. With INDICATE we aim to unlock this potential by building a federated data infrastructure for Intensive Care Units (ICUs) across Europe.
But how can you analyze data without accessing it directly? The answer lies in INDICATE’s design, specifically in its first development phase due for delivery in August 2025.
What is Federated Data Analysis?
Federated Data Analysis allows researchers to run analyses across multiple ICU datasets without seeing the raw data. It is a code-to-data scenario to facilitate secure computation.
INDICATE’s federated analysis architecture enables data users, such as researchers, innovators, and policy makers, to derive insights from ICU data across multiple institutions, regions, and European countries.
How is INDICATE designed to make Federated Data Analysis possible?
In the beginning of the project, the architecture will consist out of four essential components that work together to enable federated observational studies:
Metadata catalog
Study repository
Secure processing environment
Aggregated results exchange
Metadata Catalog
The metadata catalog is usually the starting point for a researcher who has an idea. It enables researchers to discover what data, standardized and in a common format, is available across participating hospitals without accessing the data itself. Similar to browsing a library catalog that shows book titles and summaries without revealing the books’ contents, researchers can see what types of ICU data exist and where, allowing them to design appropriate studies.
Study Package and Study Repository
The study repository manages the lifecycle of Study Packages. A Study Package is a collection of files, such as a research protocol, scripts, and data requirements that are used to answer a research question. Think of it as a library or GitHub repository where researchers can submit their study proposals. And other researchers and data providers can review the proposals, raise issues, and provide feedback. Once a researcher is happy with their proposal, they obtain ethical approval for the study. Next, the researcher can invite Data Providers to join the study. Data Providers are hospitals that participate in INDICATE and make their data available. The researcher’s institute and the Data Providers will need to enter into a Data Sharing Agreement. This Agreement includes the data processing purposes, the legal basis for processing, and how intellectual property rights are handled. After the Data Sharing Agreements have been signed, the Study Package is locked. It is now ready for download.
Secure Processing Environment
The secure processing environment is where the analysis of personal health data occurs. The health data stays within the hospital setting. This means that the hospital downloads the Study Package from the Study Repository and installs it in their Secure Processing Environment. The Study Package is executed against the hospital’s data. Think of the secure processing environment as a clean room where an analysist performs experiments the researcher told them to do without taking anything outside, except the results.
A data steward at the Data Provider is responsible for downloading the signed Study Package. They verify it is the correct version. Next they install and run the package and check for errors. If the package executed correctly, the data steward verifies the Aggregated Results. It is also their job to verify that there are no personal data remaining in the Aggregated Results. If all checks are passed, the data steward uploads the Aggregated Results to the Aggregated Results Exchange.
Aggregated Results Exchange
The aggregated results exchange enables the secure sharing of aggregated outputs from the analysis. Aggregated results include statistical summaries, such means, standard deviations, frequencies and proportions, but not individual patient data. It is like the airlock to the clean room where the results may be placed for pick-up, without the being able to enter the clean room itself.
After Aggregated Results have been uploaded to the Aggregated Results Exchange, the researcher is notified that new results are available. They can log in and download the Aggregated Results. Next, the researcher can combine all of the Aggregated Results from all participating Data Providers into one pooled result. This pooled result can be used for a scientific paper, for example.
Data Protection, Privacy and Security in INDICATE
INDICATE architecture implements privacy by design principles, maintaining data sovereignty as a core requirement. Personal data of patients always remains within the hospital, and only aggregated results leave the hospital’s environment after review.
This approach aligns perfectly with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements and physician-patient confidentiality by ensuring that:
Data providers (hospitals) retain complete control over their data
Personal data remains within the hospital’s security boundaries
Only non-sensitive, aggregated statistics are shared, such as averages, and counts
All processing occurs with appropriate legal bases and safeguards
Real-world applications
INDICATE’s first set of deliverables will result in a Minimal Viable Product that supports observational studies across European intensive care units. This way INDICATE provides immediate value through applications such as comparative effectiveness research and quality benchmarking. In comparative effectiveness research treatment approaches across different hospitals can be compared to identify best practices. Quality benchmarking allows hospitals to compare their performance metrics with peers while maintaining data privacy.
For hospital executives, this means gaining valuable insights without the compliance risks of traditional data sharing. For start-ups developing healthcare solutions, it provides access to a broader evidence base for validating innovations without the hurdles of data transfer agreements.
Moving forward
INDICATE’s Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is scheduled for completion in August 2025. This foundation will later expand to include federated machine learning (Plateau 2) and decision support capabilities (Plateau 3).
By joining INDICATE, partners like healthcare institutions can contribute to and benefit from a European-wide approach to collaborative research while maintaining full sovereignty over their data. The architecture provides the security, privacy, and governance needed to unlock the value of ICU data for better patient outcomes across Europe.
The future of healthcare research lies not in centralizing data, but in federating insights—allowing knowledge to flow while keeping sensitive information secure.
We would love to hear your thoughts on INDICATE’s design, so feel free to reach out to us via email or our LinkedIn page!
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.
