Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Population Health Information Research Infrastructure

Project description

Supporting COVID-19 public health policy decisions

COVID-19 is a cross-border issue and a public health crisis. It is paramount that COVID-19 information, particularly on population health, is organised and shared between countries to help European research and strengthen decision-making. Aiding this, the EU-funded PHIRI project aims to set up a research infrastructure that will facilitate and generate the best available evidence for research to assess the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 on population well-being, disease and mortality. This will help pave the way for improved, coordinated efforts across European stakeholders for the generation of superior COVID-19 population health knowledge. The project’s work will help lay the foundations for a distributed infrastructure on population health which can help overcome future crisis.

Objective

A structured European mechanism for COVID-19 exchange to organize and share information between countries is urgently needed, especially in the area of population health. Information on the broader impacts of COVID-19 on the health of populations is needed to facilitate multidisciplinary European research and underpin decision making. 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 following ELSI and FAIR principles. It has the objective: to provide a Health Information portal for COVID-19 with FAIR catalogues on health and health care data, to provide structured exchange between countries on COVID-19 best practices and expertise, and to promote interoperability and tackle health information inequalities. To this end, it builds with national nodes a Health Information portal (WP4) on data sources, population health studies, training material and courses, considering ethical and legal aspects. The portal is supported by WP7 that provides the technological substrate for the development of a federated research infrastructure. WP5 develops a consolidated framework to assess the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19 on population wellbeing, morbidity and mortality. WP6 will look at COVID-19 impacts in specific subgroups by conducting research through use cases of immediate relevance and facilitates research by making scalable, reproducible methods available within PHIRI. WP8, the Rapid Exchange Forum, provides swift responses to research and policy questions that are raised in countries to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. WP9 gains insights in possible future health impacts of the coronavirus outbreak by modelling scenarios for national situations. This will be carried out in close collaboration with different types of actors and initiatives across Europe (WP3).

Coordinator

SCIENSANO
Net EU contribution
€ 1 280 800,00
Address
JULIETTE WYTSMANSTRAAT 14
1050 Elsene
Belgium

See on map

Region
Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/ Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Arr. de Bruxelles-Capitale/Arr. Brussel-Hoofdstad
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 1 280 800,00

Participants (37)