Earlier this year, the university medical centres (UMCs) opted for a joint approach to set up a high quality research data infrastructure; Data4lifesciences. Under the coordination of the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), DTL collaborates with national programmes such as CTMM-TraiT, BBMRI-NL, Parelsnoer, AcZie, Mondriaan and SURF to work towards the implementation of a shared research data infrastructure for biomedical research.
Data4lifesciences aspires to create a research data infrastructure that can be used by doctors and investigators at the UMCs to retrieve clinical & experimental data on all UMC related patients and make them available to others. The infrastructure will also include capabilities to find and request biological material. The infrastructure will form a national virtual collaborative environment in which data can be registered, processed, analysed, archived and shared. The data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and will be made available in a scalable, distributed environment, in which the data processing capacity comes from national and UMC computing facilities. The infrastructure is accessible to all investigators and doctors, independently of institution or site. Patient privacy is safeguarded in the process.