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PHEMS Project Update 2026 – What We’ve Done So Far
We last provided an update on the PHEMS project in mid-2025, after the annual meeting. Work has continued since then, and this post provides an update on Aridhia’s work developing the Federated Node for PHEMS, helping establish a production ready federated network between the initial participant hospitals, and developing an audit and controls framework for future network operations.
The Federated Node
As detailed in previous blogs, our primary role in PHEMS has been developing the Federated Node (FN), an open source component for running federated data analysis. The FN itself was demoed at the second PHEMS consortium meeting in 2024, and at the 2025 meeting it was demoed operating as part of the MVP PHEMS network.
PHEMS has two high-level data federation use cases:
- Sharing clinical benchmarking data via the federated network, allowing the participating hospitals to compare outcomes on variety of treatments and procedures.
- Using the federated network to run ML models on rare disease data held by each partner. The initial objective is to create predictive models for sepsis and haemophilia.
Network testing and the subsequent demo at the 2025 meeting proved that the first of these use cases is now supported by the FN when deployed in the PHEMS network.
We are still developing the FN to support the second use case. Working with Erasmus MC, one of our consortium partners, we successfully created a proof of concept (PoC) where an ML plug-in for the FN was used to run their haemophilia model on test data. Our objective for the first quarter of 2026 is to demo an integrated version of this PoC at the PHEMS meeting in March.
The PHEMS Network
In parallel with FN development we are also helping the four founding partners of the PHEMS network to onboard. This is primarily in our role as the developer of the FN, which each partner must deploy, and connect to the shared GitHub project which is used to manage analytical code and initiate tasks. Aridhia is also providing a workspace to collate and display the benchmarking results.
Figure one below provides an overview of the network, and the 2025 meeting blog explains how it functions in more detail.
Audit and Controls:
The primary objective of PHEMS is to use the network established during the project to found the Paediatric Health Data Space (PHDS), a Europe wide federated network for sharing paediatric health data. The ultimate goal of the PHDS is to onboard all members of the European Children’s Hospital Organisation (ECHO) as data controllers, and allow them to participate in a wide range of clinical data sharing use cases.
If the network is to successfully scale as planned, then it will need a mature audits and controls framework. This covers a wide range of policies from simple admin like onboarding new users, through fault resolution processes, to the procedures required for serious incidents like accidental data release. Our third contribution as the project enters its final year, is developing this framework.
The Aridhia infosec team will be working with our partners in PHEMS to ensure the minimal required version of this is in place by the end of the project.
We look forward to catching up with our consortium partners at the next meeting in Barcelona, and will provide a further update then. If you have any questions about our work on PHEMS or federation more generally please get in touch here.
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