GDS’s Mission

Our mission is to increase the visibility of patients with rare and complex diseases by uncovering hidden clinical expertise and real-world patient pathways that are not visible in traditional datasets, helping ensure patients gain faster access to life-changing therapies.

“Our work is built on the belief that healthcare insights should always be transparent and consistent.”

Who we are

Global Data Support is a healthcare data and analytics company focused on complex and rare diseases, with more than 25 years of experience in data, clinical landscape analysis, and rare disease research. We work at the intersection of healthcare data, clinical expertise, and real-world care delivery to help bring clarity to complex disease landscapes. We deliver insights across multiple countries, with a primary focus in Europe, analysing healthcare systems and clinical networks while ensuring that our methodologies and results remain consistent and comparable across different national contexts.

Our work is built on the belief that healthcare insights should always be transparent and consistent. By analysing signals from healthcare systems, research, and clinical practice, we help reveal where expertise lies and how patients with rare and complex diseases are diagnosed, referred, and treated worldwide.

Why rare and complex disease understanding matters

Rare and complex diseases represent one of the largest areas of unmet need in global healthcare. More than 7000 rare diseases affect around 300 million people worldwide, with many of these conditions being severe, chronic, and life-threatening. Although their collective impact is substantial, each individual disease affects relatively small patient populations. This rarity makes recognition difficult and often leads to delayed or missed diagnoses.

These challenges create long diagnostic journeys for patients and make it difficult to understand how care for rare diseases is delivered in practice. Improving visibility of expertise, patient pathways, and healthcare data is therefore essential to enable earlier diagnosis, accelerate research and innovation, and improve patient outcomes.

Factors that further complicate the recognition and diagnosis of rare diseases include:

Rare diseases are often underrepresented in medical education, meaning many clinicians receive limited training in recognising these conditions. Expertise often develops through clinical experience in specialised centres, research activity, and disease awareness initiatives. Only a limited number of clinicians build this deeper knowledge. These clinicians are often connected to specialised centres and referral networks, so expertise tends to be geographically concentrated around these hubs.

Many conditions present symptoms that resemble more common diseases, increasing the risk of misdiagnosis.

Around 80% of rare diseases have a genetic origin, yet genetic testing is not always widely accessible.

Clinical information and treatment activity are often scattered across institutions, making disease patterns harder to identify.

GDS maps how patients actually move through the healthcare system rather than how the system appears at first glance. By analysing referral behaviour between local hospitals and specialised centres, we identify where a condition is first suspected, where the diagnosis is confirmed, and where follow-up treatment ultimately takes place. This provides a complete view of the pathway from initial consultation to expert care. Our network analysis uncovers the professional relationships that shape patient referrals. Clinicians who may appear less prominent in traditional datasets often play a critical role as consistent referral sources or close collaborators of key opinion leaders or decision-makers. By revealing these connections, we present a more accurate picture of clinical influence within a disease area and identify engagement opportunities that are frequently overlooked.

The result is a clear and comprehensive understanding of referral dynamics, diagnostic touchpoints, and the physicians who truly influence patient journeys.

“Rare diseases are often recognised too late due to limited awareness and fragmented information. This leads to many patients being undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. I founded Global Data Support to close this gap, improving understanding of how these diseases are identified and treated so patients can receive care sooner.”

Mark Kroes (CEO GDS)

Our Values

Our work is guided by a set of core values that define how we approach healthcare data and deliver insights. These principles ensure transparency in our methods, reliability in our results, responsibility in how data is used, and a focus on delivering insights that support real-world decisions.

Data transparency

Healthcare insights should never be a black box. Our analyses are built on transparent data sources, clearly defined methodologies, and traceable evidence behind every result.

Reliability

Global Data Support ensures the accuracy of its results by using reliable, verifiable sources, including national and government-provided databases, combined with consistent analytical methodologies across projects and healthcare systems. All outputs undergo careful validation, ensuring that findings can be consistently reproduced and confidently used in decision-making.

Social responsibility

Patients guide our work by helping identify areas where they remain unrecognised. Many rare disease patients face delayed diagnosis due to cross-specialty symptoms. By analysing healthcare data, we support earlier recognition and improve access to care, using only responsibly sourced, non-identifiable, aggregated data to protect privacy.

Practical impact

We go beyond delivering data by transforming complex information into clear, structured insights that organisations can easily understand and immediately use to support real-world decision-making.