About FReSH

The FReSH portal grew out from a shared observation in the research community: today, health study data are scattered, difficult to locate, and poorly harmonized. There is no single centralised entry point to discover data generated through human health research — whether from observational studies, interventional studies, or research in social sciences.

The catalogue of individual human health research data

The FReSH catalogue provides access to descriptions of individual data from scientific studies — including surveys, cohorts, registries, and clinical trials. These research data are produced as part of work conducted to better understand health and its determinants, assess the impact of public policies, or improve the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and management of diseases.

A Portal for Human Health Studies
The catalogue aims to include all studies involving human participants that fall under the French Loi Jardé (research involving the human person), as well as studies outside this legal framework that collect individual-level health data.

The catalogue serves as a documentary resource when developing a research project, particularly because FReSH provides users with access to discovery metadata

enabling them to identify existing studies and enhance their own work by selecting relevant datasets.

These documentation practices promote research reproducibility and foster a culture of data sharing within a secure framework.

Portal developments

A catalogue to “map and qualify health databases”

Inserm is committed to enhancing the value of data produced by health research by coordinating the national FReSH catalogue. A pillar of the national “Digital Health” acceleration strategy under the France 2030 plan, the FReSH catalogue contributes to the goal of “mapping and characterising health databases.” In this context, FReSH receives support from the French government.

A unique catalogue for health research

FReSH integrates content from the Epidemiology France Portal

The Epidemiology France Portal (PEF) was launched in 2010 to facilitate data sharing within public health research. It was one of the priority actions recommended by the Strategic Council for the Health Industries, with the goal of accelerating the development of epidemiology and public health research and fostering partnerships between public-sector researchers and private health-sector organizations.

The PEF catalogue brought together key French individual health databases useful for advancing research and expertise in public health.

Today, the FReSH catalogue hosts all the studies described in PEF. Building on this legacy, its ambition is to promote new research projects through improved identification of health databases.

Promoting interdisciplinarity in health research

Numerous platforms exist that catalogue different categories of studies or individual-level health datasets — each limited to specific domains and objectives.

Examples include clinical trial registries such as ClinicalTrials.gov or CTIS, survey data repositories such as Progedo, as well as institutional or thematic catalogues. These resources are widely used within their respective research communities.

One of FReSH’s major objectives is to foster interdisciplinarity. Future versions of the portal will therefore integrate data from other platforms. The metadata collected from such heterogeneous sources will be harmonised and standardised to ensure interoperability and accessibility — both for users and for search engines.