EHDEN - D4.1 - Technical Framework Design and Architecture

The core objective of the EHDEN consortium is to provide all the necessary services that enable a sustainable distributed European data network to perform fast, scalable, and highly reproducible research, while respecting privacy regulations, local data provenance and governance. This includes services and tools to perform data standardization, analytical pipelines, tools to share study results and tools for stakeholder engagement and training. WP4 in EHDEN will implement a technical framework and also all necessary processes for a high-quality and fully reproducible data workflow. Core to EHDEN is open science, which entails the use of open source tools, an open federated health data network, and an engaged community that shares the EHDEN vision and mission.

This deliverable provides a high-level overview of the technical framework and describes the functionality of all the components. Furthermore, we explain which components will need to interact and, to some extent, how they will be integrated.

The underlying principles of the architecture are maximal usage of available and open source tools, a federated data network approach enabling data profiling, data assessments and full studies, data quality assurance and interactive dashboards. The implementation will include a modular framework fit for up-scaling as well as access security measures.

Building the EHDEN ecosystem is clearly a socio-technical challenge. EHDEN must serve a wide range of stakeholders, including industry, regulators, academia, health care system stakeholders, patient organisations, etc. The needs of various stakeholders are considered during the build of the technical framework.

The central components, which will be accessible via the EHDEN portal, are:
1) Database Catalogue (Database characteristics, partly automated meta-data generation)
2) EHDEN Network Study Workflow Platform (ARACHNE), including Data Node
3) Study Designer (ATLAS)
4) Dashboards
5) EHDEN Academy (Training)

The central platform will interact with local components at Data Partners and Researchers (e.g. OMOP mapping, ETL tools).

The core hosting infrastructure is hosted on the AWS platform and co-located in the same region and data centre, with an exception of the ELIXR A&A system, with detailed provider later in this document. The EHDEN ecosystem will implement a Single Sign On (SSO) approach to security, including authentication and authorization, with ELIXR being used as an identity provider. The systems will be integrated e.g. each system will master manage and share with other system its core data sets, as defined in the common data model (to be defined).

This document provides an architecture blueprint for the EHDEN framework. It lays a foundation for further work which will continue to evolve during the project lifetime.