Diabetes Data Cell project 

Diabetes is one of the leading non-communicable diseases (NCDs), with a rapidly increasing burden of disease. By 2021, about 537 million adults worldwide were living with diabetes. The associated healthcare costs are high and expected to increase due to ageing and multimorbidity, unhealthy lifestyles and reduced mortality due to better medical treatments. It is therefore crucial to accurately track the prevalence, risk factors, course and treatment of diabetes in order to adapt daily care and care organization at all levels to this increasing burden.

Diabetes care is however complex. It concerns many patients with various symptoms due to different types of diabetes and complications. Their treatment is multifaceted and complex, and distributed over several disciplines of healthcare professionals, including both medical and paramedical caregivers in primary and secondary line. In addition, the daily life of the patients is highly impacted by their condition (lifestyle changes, self-monitoring, frequent medical checkups, etc.). Collecting data in these circumstances by different health care professionals at different levels of healthcare and with patient input is a major challenge.

Today, there is no diabetes registry (or combination of registries or data collections) that covers all people with diabetes in Belgium. Health data are collected by different actors or for different purposes, cover only subpopulations or regions, or lack exact diagnoses. Combination of the individual data sources is mandatory in order:

• • To be able to identify unique persons living with diabetes (albeit pseudonymized), and to more accurately determine diabetes prevalence in Belgium.
• • To form an exhaustive picture of the quality of diabetes care provided across different levels of the health care system, and the related health care costs.
• • To evaluate diabetes care.
• • To longitudinally follow up persons throughout the health care system (“patient journey”).
• • To identify populations at increased risk of developing diabetes complications.