Mission & Objectives
To improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care.
A world in which observational research produces a comprehensive understanding of health and disease.
OHDSI values
Why Europe needs a coordinating center
Transparent and reproducible research is a core principle of OHDSI. Achieving this in Europe requires more than shared methods alone. It depends on consistent data standardization, high quality implementations, and sustained coordination across countries. The OMOP Common Data Model has proven its value globally and is increasingly adopted across Europe. A European coordinating center is essential to ensure that these efforts are aligned, efficient, and sustainable.
Europe’s health data landscape is highly diverse, with many national vocabularies, data structures, and governance models. Local expertise is needed to map national coding systems and implement OMOP correctly, but many challenges are shared across countries.
A European coordinating center helps align national efforts, support coordinated vocabulary and standard maintenance, reduce duplication, and ensure that European data are fit for reuse in multinational studies.
Interest from regulators and policymakers in real world evidence continues to grow, particularly in the context of pharmacovigilance and the European Health Data Space.
A European coordinating center provides a clear interface between the OHDSI community and European stakeholders, helping translate technical standards into practice and ensuring that implementation experience informs policy development.
National and regional OHDSI nodes are the backbone of OHDSI in Europe, connecting institutions, supporting adoption, and building trust in fragmented landscapes. A European coordinating center connects these nodes, supports education and capacity building, and enables deeper collaboration through shared initiatives, studies, and events such as the annual OHDSI Europe Symposium.
By linking national efforts, supporting sustainable infrastructure, and amplifying collective expertise, a European coordinating center helps turn Europe’s diversity into a strength and ensures that European contributions fully support the global OHDSI mission.