STICHTING HEALTH-RI

Their core work

Health-RI is a Dutch national infrastructure foundation that works to make health data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) across the life sciences and healthcare. They focus on building the data management backbone needed for personalised medicine, genomics, and rare disease research. Their practical contribution lies in data stewardship, quality standards, and connecting national health research infrastructure to European platforms like EOSC. They serve as a bridge between clinical data holders, research institutions, and large-scale European data initiatives.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Health-RI's earliest H2020 involvement (2019) centred on rare disease research — data sharing, patient empowerment, and public-private partnerships through EJP RD. By 2020, their focus shifted decisively toward data infrastructure at scale: FAIR data stewardship, long-term sustainability of research platforms, genomic data standards, and connection to European cloud infrastructure (EOSC). The trajectory shows a clear move from disease-specific data work toward becoming a broad health data infrastructure provider.

Health-RI is positioning itself as a national node for European health data spaces, moving from domain-specific projects toward cross-cutting data infrastructure roles — expect them to be involved in European Health Data Space (EHDS) initiatives.

How they like to work

Health-RI operates exclusively as a participant or third party — they have never coordinated an H2020 project, which is typical for a national infrastructure body that contributes specialist data management expertise to larger consortia. With 203 unique partners across 37 countries from just 3 projects, they work in very large European consortia. This makes them an accessible partner: experienced in multi-national collaboration and accustomed to fitting into complex project structures rather than driving them.

Despite only 3 projects, Health-RI has an exceptionally broad network of 203 partners across 37 countries, reflecting their participation in flagship pan-European consortia like EJP RD and ELIXIR-CONVERGE. Their reach spans virtually all EU member states and associated countries.

What sets them apart

Health-RI occupies a specific niche as the Netherlands' national health research infrastructure foundation, which gives them a formal mandate to connect Dutch health data assets to European initiatives. Their consistent focus on FAIR data principles across every project makes them a go-to partner for any consortium needing credible data management and interoperability expertise. For consortium builders, they bring both technical data stewardship skills and institutional connections to the Dutch health research ecosystem.

Highlights from their portfolio

• ELIXIR-CONVERGE
  Their largest funded project (EUR 227,549), focused on aligning European life-science data management services — directly reflects Health-RI's core infrastructure mission.
• EJP RD
  A massive European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases with broad scope covering data, omics, clinical studies, and patient empowerment — Health-RI joined as a third party, suggesting a specialised contribution.
• B1MG
  Beyond 1 Million Genomes is a high-profile initiative connecting personalised medicine with European data infrastructure (EOSC), positioning Health-RI at the intersection of genomics and data policy.