Thijs van der Heijden

I joined the Van de Poll-group in March 2022 on the EORTC project “Big data in patients with breast cancer: risk prognosis for clinically relevant impairments of health related quality of life” or BALANCE for short.

The aim of this project is to bring together international scattered health related quality of life data (HRQoL) to create an database that allows big data analysis. In specific, prediction modelling of HRQoL with predictors ranging from (sub)domain HRQoL scores to lifestyle factors to clinical factors related to tumor characteristics or treatment.

As the data for the BALANCE project partially comes from research data and the other part from clinical routine, I am also working on the project “PROMs in the Praktijk”. In this project, I am setting up a processing pipeline to standardize the clinical routine data for research use. Where standardizing the pre-processing of the patient reported outcomes (PROs) and reproducibility of analysis are the main objectives.

Besides these two projects, I am also doing a part-time postgraduate master Epidemiology at the Universiteit  Utrecht.