DATAclinic Erasmus Project

Project Title

DATAclinic

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Cooperation between educational institutions and business

Project Summary

By discovering associations, and understanding patterns and trends within healthcare, datascience has the potential to improve medical research and patient care and consequently reducing healthcare costs. The importance of datascience is acknowledged by the European Commission who expects datascience to “help design and test new healthcare products, provide faster diagnosis and better treatments” (COM 2018).
While the rapid digitization of healthcare provides a fertile environment for the development of datascience, its impact on day-to-day medical research and clinical care depends on available knowledge and expertise in healthcare professionals and informative and fruitful collaborations between healthcare professionals (content specialists) and datascience specialist (mostly from the industry). However, healthcare professionals across Europe typically receive no or very little training in datascience, and academia only limitedly interact and collaborate with datascience experts in the industry. Specific challenges regarding the lack of knowledge and expertise concern ethics, legal issues and security of datascience.

The DATAclinic partners have therefor formulated three objectives:
1. to develop competences and skills on datascience in healthcare,
2. to implement guidelines on using datascience in an ethical, legally correct and secure way,
3. to increase mutual understanding between industry and academia related to datascience.

In order to achieve these objectives DATAclinic will develop course outputs on the following subjects:
• Data literacy (IO2),
• Data stewardship (IO3),
• Collaborative Data science (IO4),
• Data science in clinical practice (IO5).
DATAclinic will also develop a competency profile on datascience for healthcare professionals to be used as a framework for the course development (IO1).

The courses will be piloted in DATAclinic for 120 PhD students with a research ambition (future leaders in both patient care and medical research) working with datascience and their supervisors. The ultimate target group are all healthcare professionals working with datascience, leveraging healthcare datascience to improve care and research output.

The Strategic Partnership will deliver five Intellectual IOs. The work for each IO is coordinated by a lead partner who will be responsible for setting up, managing, monitoring, evaluating and finalizing the activities and for producing the deliverables. In distributing and dividing the work in the project the partners have taken background, knowledge and expertise of each of the partners as starting point. UMC Utrecht as project coordinator, is responsible for the overall management of the project.

Results and impact on project completion are:
• A curriculum which complies to the need for a healthcare workforce which has the necessary skills regarding datascience to contribute to improving the effectiveness of medical research and patient care,
• An intensified collaboration on datascience between highly valued European universities and companies,
• An important increase of the knowledge and skills of PhD students regarding datascience which improves the quality of their (research) work and their position on the labour market,
• An excellent starting position for the use of the outputs of the project in further education of healthcare professionals by the partners and other organisations,
• An important qualitative step forward in using datascience in healthcare research and in clinical practice.
The DATAclinic partners expect to attract new partners after the completion of the project due to the broad, rapidly growing interest in the subject of more efficient analysis of big data in healthcare science. Through the associated partners and other stakeholders and by using their current, wel-known training organisations and summerschools, the partners will generate interest from other countries and from other professionals in the field of healthcare science.

The DATAclinic project will benefit medical research and patient care in Europe by improving knowledge and expertise of healthcare professionals to effectively collaborate and lead in an ethical, legally correct, secure way, datascience activities and projects. Industrial partners are instrumental for healthcare professionals to further understand and appreciate the relevance of academic-industry collaborations to leverage existing healthcare datascience and improve patient care.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 414802 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAIR MEDISCH CENTRUM UTRECHT & Country: NL

Project Partners

• TARTU ULIKOOL
• ORTEC Optimization Technology B.V.
• ELEVATE BV
• UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON