Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership Project: DATAclinic

A strategic partnership for higher education funded by the European Commission.

The project coordinator of the partnership is UMC Utrecht, the Netherlands. Consortium partners include:

  • Institute of Health Informatics, University College London, UK
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Elevate BV, the Netherlands
  • University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Netherlands
  • ORTEC Optimization Technology BV, the Netherlands.
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    The project

    Healthcare professionals across Europe typically receive hardly any training in data science, and academics only have limited interactions with data science experts in the industry. Specific challenges regarding this lack of knowledge and expertise concern ethics, legal issues and security of data science.

    DATAclinic aims to fill in these knowledge gaps by:

    • developing competences and skills in data science in healthcare
    • implementing guidelines on using data science in an ethical, legally robust and secure way
    • increasing mutual understanding related to data science between industry and academia.

    The project will deliver five Intellectual outputs, namely: a Competency Profile; a module on Data Literacy; a module on Data Stewardship; a module on Collaborative Data Science; and a module on Data Science in Clinical Practice. The UCL Institute of Health Informatics will be leading the intellectual output related to Collaborative Data Science, with the primary aim to develop materials for an online distance learning module.

    Why the project is needed

    Addressing healthcare professionals’ lack of training in data science is crucial, given that, by discovering associations and understanding patterns and trends within healthcare, data science has the potential to improve medical research and patient care, and consequently reduce healthcare costs. Acknowledging the importance of data science, the European Commission expects data science to ‘help design and test new healthcare products, provide faster diagnosis and better treatments’.

    The rapid digitisation of healthcare provides a fertile environment for the development of data science. However, its impact on day-to-day medical research and clinical care depends on available knowledge and expertise in healthcare professionals. In addition, informative and fruitful collaborations between healthcare professionals (content specialists) and data science specialists (mostly from the industry) are also key.