Kees van Bochove founded The Hyve, based in Utrecht, to facilitate open source software development, enable open science by developing and FAIRifying data in life sciences. Their platform and expertise are a driving force behind the success of the EHDEN project.

The Covid-19 pandemic underscores the need for high-quality health data that is readily deployed. Europe’s early epidemiological assessments at the start of the pandemic projected infection and mortality rates by orders of magnitude in error. Once the pandemic was in full swing, official statistics in most European countries underreported coronavirus-related deaths. More recently, the retraction of two separate clinical studies for hydroxychloroquine published in two top medical journals due to unreliable primary data collection and meta-analysis demonstrated the importance of data quality for assessing vitally needed medicines.

In this podcast we discuss how EHDEN was able to produce a high-quality hydroxychloroquine peer review study in only 4 days, and how the platform will be able to assist with European healthcare decision making in the future. It also outlines many of the core issues to be discussed in a webinar series as part of EHDEN’s annual General Assembly and Road Show.

Kees studied Computer Science and Bioinformatics, for which he did his research project on lipoprotein metabolism at TNO Quality of Life in The Netherlands and the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Boston. Through his many years of experience in open source software and standards development in bioinformatics, Kees has a deep understanding of all aspects of open source development.

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