Data quality of real world data (RWD) in a complex health data space

Data quality of real world data (RWD) in a complex health data space

(Noëlla Pierlet - ongoing since November 2022)

In May 2022, the European Union proposed a regulation to establish a European Health Data Space (EHDS) (Proposal for a Regulation - The European Health Data Space, n.d.). To be able to use all the data sources containing health related data for treatments, medicines, medical devices, outcomes, research, improvement of healthcare, policy making and regulatory purposes, these data silo’s have to be disclosed, harmonized to a common language and connected to each other with a common communication protocol in a secure way. To guarantee the validity of the results of this ambitious European project, the data providers have to assess the quality of their data. In the part of the proposal that concerns primary use of health data, data quality is mentioned only casually. As this data is the information the care providers rely on to assess how the patient is doing and to determine treatment options, the quality of this data has an immediate impact on the patient's health. So, it is important that efforts have to be undertaken to assess, report on and, if necessary, improve the quality of this data.

The PhD project aims to investigate the following: Can we, by improving the quality of health data for primary use, improve the quality of care for the patient?

To work towards an answer to this question, we focus on following objectives:

• objective 1:  investigate how to measure data quality for primary use
• objective 2: demonstrate a hospital use case: building a data quality pipeline
• objective 3: evaluate the impact on quality of care after implementing the data quality pipeline and distill lessons learned

Noëlla is involved in following subprojects: 

• medEmotion
• Remote Clinical Monitoring Center (RCMC)