PreventNCD – WP8.2 Monitoring pilot
Information for professionals about the research project "Joint Action PreventNCD – WP8.2 Monitoring pilot (Data Harmonization)" at the Office of Health and Collaboration at Lillebaelt Hospital.
Description of the project
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for more than 91% of all deaths in the EU and represent a major burden on healthcare systems. Many NCDs share preventable behavioral risk factors such as smoking, physical inactivity, alcohol consumption and unhealthy diets. JA PreventNCD is a European collaboration aimed at reducing the burden of cancer and other NCDs through coordinated strategies targeting both personal and societal risk factors.
WP8.2 focuses on building a data foundation that enables earlier identification of individuals at high risk of developing NCDs. This work includes data harmonization across national and regional sources, development of machine-learning models for risk prediction and exploration of new monitoring methods.
The overall objective of the project
Joint Action PreventNCD – WP8.2 Monitoring pilot (Data Harmonization) aims to establish a comprehensive, national-scale data infrastructure to improve early detection and monitoring of risk factors related to cancer and other NCDs. By integrating multiple existing data sources and applying advanced machine-learning methods, the project seeks to:
- Identify individuals at increased risk of NCDs through predictive models.
- Support evidence-based prevention strategies in general practice and population-level screening.
- Develop and test a new population survey informed by model-identified risk factors.
- Provide recommendations on the effectiveness and scalability of data harmonization and machine learning based NCD prediction across Europe.
- The project is part of the EU Joint Action PreventNCD and runs throughout the Joint Action program period.
The role of Lillebaelt Hospital
Lillebaelt Hospital leads WP8.2 and is responsible for the development of the data infrastructure, coordination of national data integration, and the design and evaluation of machine-learning models.
The hospital collaborates with national partners including Statistics Denmark, the Danish Health Data Authority, general practice researchers, clinical departments and universities. Regional data sources, clinical quality databases (RKKP) and citizen-generated data (DataDonor) are integrated into the project platform to support large-scale analysis.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Joint Action PreventNCD program.
- Building a secure, GDPR-compliant national data platform integrating registries, clinical databases, PROMs, general practice data and citizen-generated data.
- Designing ML models using data from millions of citizens to predict risk of major NCDs such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, respiratory disease and mental health disorders.
- Applying Explainable AI to identify the most important risk factors and ensure transparency, reproducibility and ethical robustness.
- Developing a new NCD-Prevent survey informed by model-based risk factors.
- Establishing a central platform enabling multiple NCD-related subprojects to reuse harmonized datasets