QUANTUM (Quality, Utility and Maturity Measured) has its roots in Article 56 of the European Health Data Space Regulation, an article that mandates the labeling of health datasets within the EU to show their quality and usefulness. However, quality labels only work when accepted by the user community at large. It is crucial to act transparent when establishing a label and create the needed trust amongst the potential users. The 35 partners of QUANTUM will therefore design a very user-friendly labeling system for health datasets, and provide the means and tools to assess data quality and maturity in an easy way.
Thanks to the efforts of QUANTUM, users of the European Health Data Space (EHDS), such as researchers, policymakers and health professionals, will have access to well-described, high quality datasets. Quality data allow for informed decisions, increase data reliability and will improve data management practices in the healthcare sector. Ultimately, better data allow for better biomedical research, needed to monitor and improve the health of European citizens.
Within QUANTUM, that is coordinated by the Aragon Institute of Health Sciences (IACS), from Spain, the Dutch research community is well represented. Health-RI plays a major role, and also the Erasmus UMC is involved. DANS acts as a test-case repository partner to see if also smaller datasets from research groups can be assessed using the QUANTUM quality labels. The project will contribute to the overall mission of DANS to improve data quality and the FAIRness of datasets, to allow for an optimal and safe re-use of data. Both the DANS Data Station Life sciences, as well as the DANS Data Station Social Sciences and Humanities, will be involved.
More on the QUANTUM project is available through the CORDIS website on EU projects and the website of the project itself.
