With an aim to improve quality of health and demographic data in India, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Wednesday launched an integrated national-level platform that can help close the knowledge gap and boost policy formulations.
The National Data Quality Forum (NDQF) will integrate learning from scientific and evidence-based initiatives and guide actions through periodic workshops and conferences.
“India has a rich resource of data on its population, its health status and demographic behaviour and economic condition among many other aspects of life and environment. This wealth of data is translated into insights and, eventually, into policy through a layered process involving human and technological inputs at every stage.
However, these data often suffer from some common challenges related to human and technological factors and affect its quality,” ICMR said in a statement.
While in recent year’s data quality improvement efforts have been undertaken in both the public and private sectors at independent institution levels, a convergence of these efforts is yet to be achieved in the form of an integrated platform at the national level that can guide data quality improvement efforts in a cohesive manner, it said.
This activity will gear towards establishing protocols and good practices when dealing with data collection, storage, use and dissemination that can be applied to health and demographic data, as well as replicated across industries and sectors.
“With a renewed emphasis on improving the quality of data that feeds into evidence based decision making at different levels, the NDQF hopes to bring together relevant stakeholders, subject matter experts, industry leaders, decision makers, and data scientists / analysts onto a common platform,” it said, adding that this platform will be guided by the direction provided by a high level steering committee and operationalized with the help of a technical advisory group composed of subject matter experts.
“We are delighted to launch the NDQF and embark upon a fruitful collaboration to generate meaningful dialogue around the improvement of data quality in general and for health and medical research in particular.” Professor (Dr) Balram Bhargava, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research.
“NCAER is deeply committed to improving data quality in India by fostering an innovation-driven culture of data collection through our activities and our partnerships with MoSPI, the Gates Foundation, and others. We are excited about the community of practice that the National Data,” he said.
Quality forum is establishing for producers and consumers of data in India and look forward to supporting the Forum wholeheartedly in the years to come.” Dr Shekhar Shah, Director General of the National Council of Applied Economic Research.
“Challenges related to data quality need to be addressed at multiple levels and the International Institute for Population Sciences is committed to contributing to the improvement of the quality of health and demographic data in the country through strategic partnerships, such as with the National Data Quality Forum.” Dr KS James, Director and Senior Professor of the Mumbai based International Institute for Population Sciences.