The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)’s National Institute for Medical Statistics (ICMR – NIMS), in partnership with Population Council, launched the National Data Quality Forum (NDQF) in the ICMR Hqrs on July 24, 2019.
Objective/Functions
- NDQF will integrate learnings from scientific and evidence-based initiatives and guide actions through periodic workshops and conferences.
- Its activities 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.
Background
- 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.
- While in recent years 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.
- 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.
- 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 with a mandate to create a dialogue for data quality, and build a like-minded community of practice.
