About the Catalogue

The National Health Data Catalogue contains metadata about the available datasets, meaning it contains the description of the datasets and other resources. This description includes, for example, a date when the dataset was created, the authors, or a URL where the data can be found. The metadata hosted within the National Health Data Catalogue are sourced from a diverse range of origins and domains. These sources can span from electronic records to images, biomaterials, omics data, collections and many more.

The goal of the National Health Data Catalogue is to create an infrastructure for secondary use of data where researchers and other interested parties can find and access cross-domain data relevant to their research. The intent is to harvest currently available data from any health-care and life science domain in the Netherlands.

The catalogue's goal is to foster FAIR data principles—making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable for its users. To delve deeper into the concept of FAIR, you can find more information about it here.

Towards the European Health Data Space (EHDS)

To be included in the catalogue, dataset descriptions must meet the minimum requirements of a metadata standard. The EHDS mandates a specific standard for describing health datasets, called HealthDCAT-AP. Therefore, the National Health Data Catalogue bases its dataset descriptions on this standard.

This enables datasets in the National Health Data Catalogue, that are within EHDS scope, to also become discoverable in the European health data catalogue. Pilots will be conducted during the 2025–2026 period to test this within the HDAB-NL program. In HDAB-NL, Health-RI collaborates with the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS), ICTU, Statistics Netherlands (CBS), and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) to prepare for EHDS, whose initial obligations will come into effect by the end of March 2029.

Making your data findable

To make your data findable in the Catalogue, please find an overview of the necessary steps here: https://www.healthdata.nl/en/step-step-guide-onboard-your-data