PHIRI - Population Health Information Research Infrastructure

Health is a cross-border issue, recently demonstrated by the COVID-19 public health crisis. Especially in the area of population health, we need a structured European mechanism for COVID-19 exchange to organise and share information between countries. PHIRI  implements a research infrastructure to facilitate and generate the best available evidence for research on health and well-being of populations as impacted by COVID-19. PHIRI allows for better coordinated European efforts across national and European stakeholders to generate the best COVID-19 population health knowledge to underpin decision making. 
 
PHIRI facilitates and supports open, interconnected, and data-driven research. We do this through the sharing of cross-country COVID-19 population health information and exchange of best practices related to identification of data sources, access, assessment and reuse of data on COVID-19 determinants, risk setting and outcomes following ELSI and FAIR principles. PHIRI for COVID-19 has the following objectives:

1. To provide a Health Information portal for COVID-19 with FAIR catalogues on health and health care data for structured information exchange across European countries. It facilitates access to and use of  COVID-19 relevant population health and care data provided by EU countries’ public health bodies represented in the PHIRI applicant consortium. It provides the services and tools necessary for researchers to link different data sources and to use Pan-European data in a GDPR compliant, federated way.
2. To provide structured exchange between countries on COVID-19 best practices and expertise. PHIRI shares public health and clinical management information and methodologies identified and allows researchers to provide relevant and evidence based information ready for use in research, and decision-making processes by citizens, clinicians, public health practitioners and policy makers.
3. To promote interoperability and tackle health information inequalities. PHIRI supports researchers and public health bodies to research queries related to COVID-19. It provides capacity building for management of COVID-19 relevant population health and healthcare data starting from the phase of designing data collections to analysis, reporting and preservation. Training of the health research community involves both the data producers and data users.

PHIRI’s work packages

1. Coordination and management
2. Communication and portal development
3. Outreach, engagement and sustainability
4. Health Information portal for COVID-19 
5. Research methodologies to assess the impact of COVID-19
6. Research use cases measuring the impact of COVID-19 on population health
7. Building a federated research infrastructure for a rapid policy response
8. Rapid Exchange Forum
9. Foresight Modelling and Scenarios

More information on the website of the PHIRI project