The master’s degree has received funding from EIT Health of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology and incorporates European universities and organisations. Pre-registration is open until 15 April

The Interuniversity Master’s Degree in Biomedical Data Science, which is taught across a consortium of seven Catalan universities and is coordinated by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), has been converted into the Master’s Degree in Health Data Science after receiving official approval from the Ministry and funding from EIT Health, the health knowledge and innovation community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. This new master’s degree, for which the registration period is now open, has received 1.2 million euros to fund the innovation and entrepreneurship skills of clinical data scientists up to 2027.

The master’s degree consortium has been internationalised with the entry of the Université Grenoble Alpes (France) and its educational content has been expanded with optional subjects, in particular through a major boost to the block on entrepreneurship and innovation, with an important contribution by the non-academic institutions of Barcelona Health Hub, Bioinformatics Barcelona, Amgen Spain and Amgen Research Munich.

In addition to the URV, the academic members of the consortium are the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), the Universitat de Girona (UdG), the Universitat de Lleida (UdL), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and the Universitat de Vic – Universitat Central de Catalunya (UVic-UCC).

Thus, for the first time this 120-credit online master’s degree (taught in English) now offers a Business Lab where students can learn how to turn an idea into a scalable solution. It also includes the Citizens and Patients subject and an internship in international companies.

The entrepreneurship and innovation block is also equipped with more resources for the summer school, where students meet in person with the aim of putting into practice their knowledge and devising solutions to the challenges put forward by both the health staff and the patient associations who take part in the course.

In addition to the specific improvements to the entrepreneurship and innovation module, EIT Health’s support in the future will enable the acquisition of equipment so work can be done with advanced artificial intelligence techniques.

The revitalised master’s degree will start in the 2024-25 academic year with 80 places offered to students from the fields of engineering and bioinformatics, among other technical and scientific backgrounds. Thus, successful candidates will follow a training programme in health data science that will cover a range of areas, including the different types of data generated by healthcare and research activity in a clinical environment, the ethical, privacy and legal issues related to such data, the technologies for managing and processing the data, and the specific approaches to their analysis in different areas of biomedicine.

Finally, this master’s degree aims to provide the interdisciplinary training necessary to identify and evaluate opportunities and data-based solutions to current health challenges and, ultimately, to improve health care.

The Master’s Degree in Health Data Science is taught online synchronously in order to promote interaction between students and lecturers, with classes scheduled for the afternoons to be compatible with the working day. Pre-registration is now open on the website of the URV.