One year into IDERHA: Annual Consortium Meeting

The opening of the Annual Consortium Meeting (ACM) started with our project leads Philip Gribbon and Christian Muehlendyck cycling to the front of the venue, to loud applause of the laughing crowd. “When cycling alone my maximum speed is twenty-two kilometres per hour”, Phil explained the metaphor. “However, when I am part of a team, even though I do not know everyone in the team, we can easily get an average of forty kilometres per hour.” He stated that during the first year IDERHA grew from individual cyclists to a peloton, being able to achieve much more together. 

The IDERHA ACM, organized on the 16^th and 17^th of April, took place at the Fraunhofer Forum Berlin, right in the city centre. The program was full of presentations, updates from work packages and discussion sessions during which the priorities and plans for the second year of the project were discussed. Altogether a great opportunity to share ideas and address the challenges we're facing. 

Prof. Dr. Martin Gersch from the Freie Universität Berlin opened the ACM with an inspiring keynote lecture, sharing his expertise on data spaces and sustainable business models with regard to Health-X, EHDS and beyond. After this opening, all work packages shared their work from the past year and briefly looked forward to the upcoming year. A considerable part of the IDERHA project is creating the data infrastructure and the main conclusion of this part was clearly stated by Christian: “We do not want a black box model; we really want to understand what is happening in the population.” 

After the work package updates, Prof. Dipak Kalra gave an interesting talk about the European Health Data Space (EHDS): “Health is the first sector to get a data space, which provides us with opportunities but also means we are the guinea pig. As IDERHA we can influence how the EHDS will eventually look like and that is a wonderful opportunity we must be aware off.” During the meeting it was noted that there are quite some projects like IDERHA and working together with these synergy projects could be beneficial to all. 

After looking back at year one, all IDERHA consortium members could start looking forward. To stay true to the metaphor: the peloton is now formed and during this next year all small teams within the peloton will work together to come closer to achieving IDERHA’s goals. 

Trust is key, as is the input of patients and patient representatives in many aspects of the project, to make sure their voice resonates in our output. This was emphasized by the valuable comments of several members of the Patient Advisory Board during the presentations.

In between the presentations and sessions there was ample opportunity to catch up, to get to know each other better, and to seek new ways to collaborate. As always, forging new relationships and collaborations mainly happened during the lunches, breaks, and the excellent consortium dinner on Tuesday evening. 

Finally, IDERHA wants to thank their partner Fraunhofer for their hospitality at the Fraunhofer Forum Berlin in the city centre of Berlin and for organising this inspiring and fruitful meeting. 

You can download a high resolution version of the group picture here.