PHIRI is the roll-out of the research infrastructure on population health information that aims to facilitate and generate the best available evidence for research on health and well-being of populations as impacted by COVID-19. This project allows for better coordinated European efforts across national and European stakeholders to generate the best COVID-19 population health knowledge. In doing so, PHIRI is laying the foundation to build a Distributed Infrastructure on Population Health (DIPoH) to be used to overcome future crisis and ensure the sustainability of the project. The intent is to support research across Europe through the identification, access, assessment and reuse of population health and non-health data to underpin public health policy decisions.
This is achieved through a close collaboration with 41 partners across 30 countries over a period of 36 months (November 2020 – November 2023). The project is divided in 9 work packages with three transversal topics.
PHIRI aims to facilitate and support open, interconnected, and data-driven research through the sharing of cross-country COVID-19 population health information and exchange of best practices related to data collection, curation, processing, use and reuse of data following ELSI and FAIR principles.
Project CoordinatorThe coordinating institution of PHIRI is Sciensano
WP 7 CoordinatorInstitute for Health Sciences (IACS) coordinate WP 7 «Building a federated research infrastructure for a rapid policy response»
Participation in WP 6IACS participate in WP6 leading a use case “Delayed care in cancer patients”
FundingThis project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101018317
PHIRI builds on the achievements of the BRIDGE Health and the Joint Action on Health Information (InfAct) projects.
More information: As an overarching goal, WP7 aims to create and validate a federated research infrastructure that overcomes data reuse & data sharing hindrances for rapid policy relevant research response to the evolving pandemic. This WP will develop on five main objectives and task.
This work package will provide the technological substrate to support the development of a federated research infrastructure that overcomes these hindrances whilst producing research outputs for a rapid policy response.
More information: www.phiri.eu/wp7
As a result, the PHIRI infrastructure delivered will play a key role in the future European Health Data Space as well as in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Task 7.1. Development of an overarching demonstration pilot
Task 7.1 will demonstrate the capacities of the federated research infrastructure for the production of accurate and timely research outputs for a rapid policy response on COVID-19. The task entails the identification of the relevant data sources, the development of the data model and the analytical pipeline, and the FAIR reporting of the rapid cycle outputs. This task will generate solutions for the rapid cycle analysis and reporting of testing policies and assessment of the impact of control measures in the evolution of infections and hospitalizations. In addition, the analytical pipeline will be adapted so as to be able to reuse those COVID-19 data collections collected by ECDC for surveillance purposes. Alongside these efforts, PHIRI will explore with ECDC if collection of epidemiological data from MS can be reinforced and improved using the capacities of the relevant national public health bodies participating in the PHIRI consortium.
Task 7.2 Development of the federated infrastructure solutions
This task represents the actual development of the federated research infrastructure solutions, driven by the WP6 use cases. First, the CDM design will explore the use of the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) CDM, a widely adopted CDM for observational health data analytics. Secondly, the analytical pipelines that support the use-cases will compute the local solutions for the research question on each data hub, moving these final aggregated results to the coordination hub, who will merge them for further comparative analysis between partners. Lastly, all the software developed will be open sourced and included in the WP4 PHIRI Portal.
Task 7.3 Capacity building and Developers working group
This task will focus on the capacity building within the participant hubs’ personnel in two complementary ways:
Task 7.4 Validation of the federated infrastructure solutions
T7.3 will focus on validating the software solutions developed in T7.2, for the Common Data Model, the ETL processes and analytical pipelines, including the implementation of patches to solve the detected issues detected.
Task 7.5 Upgrading options for PHIRI research infrastructure
This task will evaluate advanced distributed analysis techniques to upgrade options for PHIRI research infrastructure. At the same time, this task will assess the eventual need for future increasing computational and storage capacity; thus, the need of linkage with high performance computing centres or, public or private clouds. Finally, this task will get insight from WP9 on effective modelling with a view to upgrade the PHIRI infrastructure according to policy requirements.
All outputs about WP7 of the PHIRI project and WP6 use case
All WPs Results of the PHIRI project
Access to the deliverable D7.1:
Small-scale prototype of PHIRI federated infrastructure (D7.1)
Enrique Bernal-Delgado, Francisco Estupiñán-Romero, Javier González-Galindo, Carlos Tellería-Orriols, & Juan González-García. (2022). PHIRI – WP7 – Pilot scripts for local analyses (RMarkdown) (1.0.0). Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7092522
Enrique Bernal-Delgado, Francisco Estupiñán-Romero, Javier González-Galindo, Carlos Tellería-Orriols, & Juan González-García. (2022). PHIRI – WP7 – Pilot outputs from the local analyses (interactive reports). Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7097341
Javier González-Galindo, Francisco Estupiñán-Romero, David Chichell-Ruíz, Juan González-García, Carlos Tellería-Orriols, & Enrique Bernal-Delgado. (2021). PHIRI APP – WP7 – PHIRI Federated Research Infrastructure (FRI) – D7.1 Small-scale prototype of PHIRI federated infrastructure (1.3.0). Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5729311
List of PHIRI´s partners
The members of PHIRI Steering Committee
Its membership is made up of the leaders and co-leaders of each of the project work packages. The Committee meets multiple times during the life of the project, with ongoing electronic discussion.
The coordinating institution of PHIRI is Sciensano.
WP 7 PHIRI Leader
Edificio CIBA
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13
50009 Zaragoza
976 715 483
atlasvpm.iacs@aragon.es
cienciadedatosysalud.iacs@aragon.es
Atlas VPM, coordinated by IACS, is recognized by the Spanish Ministry of Health and Social Services and Equality as a privileged source (“Registro de Utilidad”) for the National Health System.
