Position: Work Package 3

Who am I & what do I do?

My name is Anouk Kruiswijk and I am a senior consultant at KPMG The Netherlands. I started my career as a PhD student at the Leiden University Medical Center where I worked at the intersection of clinical research and artificial intelligence. After my PhD, I transitioned into consultancy, allowing me to combine academic research with real-world implementation and strategy. I very much enjoy working at the boundary of these two worlds!

What am I up to during INDICATE?

Together with my colleague Mark van Driessen, I am responsible for Work Package 3 within INDICATE. In this role, we advise the project on how to set up a sustainable INDICATE ecosystem beyond the project phase. This includes designing the legal entity, developing governance structures, defining clear roles and responsibilities, shaping a viable business model, and outlining a realistic implementation roadmap. Our goal is to ensure that INDICATE can grow into a durable European infrastructure that continues to create value after the project ends.

What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?

With my background as a researcher, I know how crucial high-quality and accessible data is for research and for improving patient care, but also how challenging it can be to access the right data, especially across hospitals and national borders. At the same time, I have often seen valuable initiatives struggle or come to a halt once the project phase ends. INDICATE brings together academia, healthcare practice, industry and consultancy, and that combination motivates me greatly. I strongly believe that by connecting these worlds, we can turn INDICATE into a truly sustainable and impactful infrastructure that helps to further improve patient care.

What do I expect to accomplish within INDICATE?

Within INDICATE, I hope to help build a future-proof organisational and governance foundation that enables long-term collaboration, trust and scalability. Success for me means that INDICATE does not end as a project, but continues as a stable platform that supports research, innovation and patient-centred care across Europe.

How does my background or expertise contribute to the goals of INDICATE?

My strength lies in bridging research and practice. By combining an academic background in medical AI with consulting experience in governance, strategy and implementation, I aim to help translate ambitious clinical and technological goals into workable structures that function in real-world healthcare settings. This combination allows me to connect different perspectives and contribute to INDICATE’s goal of creating a trustworthy, sustainable European ICU data infrastructure.

Position: Work Package 6

Who am I & what do I do?

My name is Marcel Giemsa, and I work as a Research Associate at the Department of Cardiology, Pulmonology and Angiology at the University Hospital Düsseldorf, in the group of Prof. Dr. Dr. med. Christian Jung. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Ruhr University Bochum, and this summer I will complete a second Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. I originally joined Christian’s group as a student assistant, and after some time he asked me whether I would like to take on a larger role within the team — which is how I ended up working on INDICATE.

What am I up to during INDICATE?

Within INDICATE, I am responsible for the coordination of Work Package 6 and take on technical coordination tasks across the project. This includes a fair amount of hands-on project management, as well as supporting data analysis activities. A core part of my role is acting as a bridge between the clinical and the technical domains: translating clinical requirements into technical specifications, and making sure that the technical work stays aligned with the real-world needs of the ICUs and clinicians we serve. Because WP6 sits at the intersection of so many topics, a lot of my day-to-day work is about keeping the different threads connected and making sure information flows between the people who need it.

What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?

Combining medicine and IT has been something I wanted to do for as long as I can remember. It is the reason I studied both Biology and Computer Science in the first place. Working with Prof. Jung has been a great experience from day one: we quickly realized that our backgrounds complement each other well, and there is a lot of mutual trust in what each of us brings to the table. On top of that, AI in medicine is a field I find genuinely exciting, and at the same time one of the hardest when it comes to getting access to high-quality data. INDICATE tackles exactly that bottleneck, and being able to contribute to a project that works on this problem at a European scale is a rare opportunity that I didn’t want to miss.

What do I expect to accomplish within INDICATE?

On a personal level, my main goal is to deeply understand how a large EU project like INDICATE is structured — from governance and reporting to the technical coordination between dozens of partners — and to learn which pitfalls tend to come up along the way. EU projects are complex, and a lot of the knowledge about how to run them well is experience-based. I want to build exactly that kind of experience, so that in future EU projects I can help avoid problems before they occur and contribute from an even stronger starting position. Beyond that, I hope to see WP6 deliver results that genuinely support the wider project and the clinicians and researchers who will eventually work with the INDICATE infrastructure.

How does my background or expertise contribute to the goals of INDICATE?

My dual background is what I try to bring into the project every day. From Biology, I bring scientific working practices and an understanding of biological and medical processes, which helps me engage meaningfully with clinical partners and the use cases we are building around. From Computer Science, I bring a solid foundation in machine learning and in thinking about data and systems. In a project like INDICATE, where clinicians, data scientists, engineers, and ML researchers all need to work together, the biggest challenge is often not the individual disciplines but the communication between them. Because I know both “camps” from the inside, I can translate between them, ask the right questions on either side, and help make sure that technical decisions respect clinical reality — and vice versa. That is the contribution I try to make within INDICATE.

Position: Work Package 3

Who am I?

My name is Mark Driessen, Manager at KPMG Netherlands, based in Amstelveen. I started my professional career as a physical therapist, which gave me a strong grounding in clinical practice and the day‑to‑day realities of healthcare delivery. After a period at the Royal Dutch Marines I continued my career in consultancy with a focus on digital strategy and healthcare transformation, where I now work at the intersection of care, data, and technology.

What do I do?

In my current role, I advise healthcare organizations on digital strategy, data & AI, cloud transformation, and governance. I support organizations in translating strategic ambitions into practical, sustainable solutions, with a strong focus on collaboration between care providers, technology partners, and policymakers. My work combines strategic design with hands‑on implementation, always anchored in real healthcare needs.

What am I up to during INDICATE? Connected to which WP? Which cases do I work on?

Within INDICATE, I contribute primarily to Work Package 3 (WP3). My focus is on topics such as governance models, business models and the organizational structure of the future organization, and sustainable collaboration mechanisms for data sharing. WP3 focuses on supporting partners in translating technical and clinical ambitions into viable organizational and governance setups that can scale beyond the project context into a sustainable organization.

What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?

I’m excited to contribute to Indicate. What motivates me most is INDICATE’s ambition to bridge the gap between data, technology, and real clinical impact. Having started my career in direct patient care, I am driven by initiatives that do not stop at technical innovation, but actively improve how healthcare professionals collaborate and how patients ultimately benefit from better use of data.

What do I expect to accomplish within INDICATE?

Within INDICATE, I aim to help create clear, workable governance and organizational foundations that enable data sharing to function in practice – not only during the project, but also afterwards. My goal is to contribute to outcomes that are legally sound, organizationally feasible, and broadly adoptable across different healthcare contexts in Europe. Together we can drive meaningful change.

How does my background or expertise contribute to the goals of INDICATE?

My background combines experience in direct patient care, management roles in healthcare institutions and working in digital strategy and large‑scale healthcare transformation. This allows me to connect strategic, technical, and organizational perspectives, and to help different stakeholders understand each other’s challenges and goals. Within INDICATE, I aim to use this bridging role to support solutions that are trusted, usable, and sustainable across diverse healthcare settings.

Position: Work Package 4

Who am I and what do I do?

My name is Bert Cappelle. I work as a data engineer at the University Hospital of Ghent (UZ Gent) within the Data Science Institute. My work focuses on enabling and facilitating clinical research by making complex healthcare data accessible and usable for non-technical users, such as clinicians and researchers.

I design and maintain data pipelines, data models, and validation workflows that allow research teams to work with high-quality data without needing deep technical expertise. I am also the technical representative for UZ Gent within the Federated Health Innovation Network (FHIN), which supports federated learning for relevant clinical use cases. In addition, I am leading implementation and maintenance of the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) at UZ Gent.

What am I up to during INDICATE? 

Within INDICATE, I support Mathias Syx, the lead of Work Package 4, in his day-to-day activities. WP4 focuses on the technical infrastructure required to enable secure, compliant, and scalable data sharing across participating organizations.

Together, UZ Gent takes on the product owner role for the components developed within WP4. This involves translating project objectives and stakeholder needs into concrete technical requirements, prioritizing development work, coordinating between technical and non-technical partners, and ensuring that the resulting infrastructure is aligned with real-world hospital environments.

In addition, I act as a WP4 representative in the training and education workgroup, where I help ensure that technical infrastructure, requirements, and design choices are clearly translated into training materials and guidance that are understandable and usable for hospitals and data providers.

What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?

I am motivated by INDICATE’s goal of making secure health data sharing workable in real hospital settings. I enjoy contributing to research by helping make high-quality data more accessible for researchers and clinicians. 

What do I expect to accomplish within INDICATE?

Within INDICATE, I aim to help develop technical infrastructure and guidance that hospitals can realistically use and maintain. I want to contribute to solutions that make it easier for hospitals to participate in secure and federated data-sharing initiatives and to support research activities.

How does my background or expertise contribute to the goals of INDICATE?

My background in data engineering and my experience working in a hospital environment help me connect technical solutions with everyday practice. In addition, my expertise in the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) allows me to contribute to interoperable and standardized solutions that support clinical research.

Position: Work Package 2

Who am I?

My name is María Parra Rodríguez Armijo. I am part of the Computational Health Informatics Group at Virgen del Rocío University Hospital, within the Andalusian Health Service (SAS). My work focuses on data interoperability, FAIR principles and the preparation of clinical data for research and innovation.

What do I do in INDICATE?

I contribute to the methodological guidance developed in WP2, designing the ETL dataflow and translating interoperability standards into practical instructions that hospitals can apply when preparing their ICU data.

What am I up to during INDICATE?

I am part of Work Package 2 (WP2), which focuses on defining the INDICATE Common Data Models and supporting data providers in preparing their ICU data for the federated infrastructure. Within WP2, I am responsible for drafting the Data Provider Handbook, which provides the methodological and technical guidance that data providers will follow when preparing and transforming their data. I also support coordination across WP2 to ensure that the guidance is coherent, feasible and aligned with the needs of the clinical use cases.

What motivates me to be part of INDICATE?

I am motivated by the challenge of making complex data harmonisation processes accessible and supporting the adoption of shared methodologies across hospitals.