Intego stands for "Integrated Computer Network".
In 1990, the project started at the Academic Center for General Practice (www.achg.be) of KU Leuven. The aim was to build a large database of primary care morbidity with information on the incidence and prevalence of diseases in Flanders. Data on diagnostic tests and treatments in general practice also became available. Data collection had to be carried out semi-automatically, with routine data from the general practitioner's electronic medical record (EMR) being copied and then entered into a database. For this purpose, a collaboration was established with the software company Datasoft (later OmegaSoft Medical from the Omega Pharma Company group, and then separated from this group under the name Corilus as part of Arseus), producer of the medical software Medidoc®.
The first researchers of this project, Jan Heyrman and Bert Aertgeerts, encountered numerous problems because the hardware at that time was not powerful enough to process large amounts of information. New software had to be written for each research question, causing delays. After the first evaluation study, funded by the National Fund for Scientific Research, the project was restarted from 1994 with the first data collections. The Intego network of KU Leuven was the first automated general practice registration network in Belgium. The processing of the data confirmed the relevance of the system.
A new data collection in the practices took place in May 1999, and the results of this data collection were published in the spring of 2001. A few months later, the Ministry of the Flemish Community, on behalf of the minister responsible for health policy, decided to provide financial support to the project. A restart was possible. During the years 2001-2003, the focus was mainly on the structure and design of the database. From 2004, the information in the database could be fully utilized.
Years of experience working with Intego allowed us to publish an article in 2014 describing the design, possibilities, and limitations of research based on biomedical data routinely collected in general practices (https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6947-14-48).
General practice ICT has undergone significant changes in recent years in Flanders. Medidoc®, which struggled with outdated technological infrastructure, was no longer supported by Corilus and was progressively replaced by CareConnect®. Since 2018, data has been collected fully automatically from CareConnect. Data collection now takes place weekly instead of annually, allowing INTEGO to further evolve as a monitoring instrument. Moreover, since 2018, the network has been open to all practices that want to register quality data in the EMR and work on quality of care. In the future, we hope to also connect other general practice EMR systems to INTEGO.
Since 2017, Intego has been tasked by the Flemish government with mapping the impact of environmental pollution (fine dust, soot, etc.) on people's health. This environmental project requires both a 'broadening' and a 'deepening' of the Intego Network. By 'broadening', we mean that we will need more registrars to refine the data geographically. By 'deepening', we mean that we will need more data than has been collected so far. Intego thus faces a challenging future, building on the experience we have gained over 30 years in collecting, processing, and evaluating data from general practice.
Today, in 2025, Intego is still funded by the Flemish Community and includes a network of approximately 500 general practitioners working in more than 130 general practices spread across Flanders. The data is available to researchers, policymakers, master's students, and anyone who thinks they can use the data.