22 September 2026
Saija Jarvimaki
A new study demonstrates that building a national diabetes data infrastructure is feasible, offering policymakers a stronger foundation for data-driven decision-making. The Diabetes Data Cell Project shows how linking real-world health data across care settings can provide a comprehensive view of patient pathways, treatment outcomes and healthcare use.
By integrating data from primary care, specialised services and national insurance records, the project created a linked dataset covering nearly 77,000 individuals living with diabetes. The study was conducted in Belgium, where the Diabetes Data Cell Project brings together data from multiple parts of the healthcare system. This enables a longitudinal, across-system perspective on care, including information on treatments, complications, healthcare utilisation and costs, offering insights that are not possible with fragmented data sources alone.
“This project shows that it is possible to integrate health data across different parts of the healthcare system and make it usable for policy. This is a crucial step towards more informed and effective decision-making,” says lead author Astrid Lavens.
Implications for policymakers
The findings demonstrate that large-scale data linkage is feasible within existing legal and technical frameworks, and can support more systematic monitoring of care quality, identification of high-risk groups and evaluation of health policy measures.
Although developed in the Belgian health system, the approach is transferable and provides a model that can be applied in other European countries. Diabetes remains a major and growing public health challenge, while health data in many countries is still fragmented across multiple care systems. By addressing this gap, the project lays the foundation for a continuously updated national diabetes registry and contributes to broader European efforts, such as JACARDI and the European Health Data Space, to strengthen the use of real-world data in policy making.
Publication: Development of a comprehensive real-world evidence dataset to inform diabetes policy: the Diabetes Data Cell Project
Authors: Astrid Lavens, David Jaminé, Montse Urbina, Bert Vaes, Chantal Mathieu, Frank Nobels et al.
Journal: BMC Public Health
Publication date: 2 June 2026