Healthcompetence is an open, pan-European infrastructure for information on research projects & results within Health Science

The results generated through projects funded by the European Commission (EC) represent a considerable part of the health research conducted in Europe. Access to high-quality information on these research activities and results is therefore critical for successful planning and decision making at universities, research organisations and funding agencies, and hence for improving collaborations, research performance and innovation capabilities. The purpose of HealthCompetence.eu is to ensure a continuous quality assurance and access to this information.

HealthCompetence.eu is a pan-European Research Information System making key information accessible on all projects funded by the EC within Health Science in the 6^th and 7^th Framework Programmes (FP6 & FP7). The information includes the projects' results in terms of publications, patents and technology offers, and is an open source of information for the stakeholders, such as project coordinators, scientists, technology transfer officers, research administrators, policy makers & programme managers within academia, industry, the EC and other funding agencies. HealthCompetence.eu serves in this way to support the stakeholders in their efforts to find collaboration partners, do benchmarking, analyse networks, make research performance assessments and get answers to European policy issues.

A key challenge is to collect all the information and continuously keep it correct and up-to-date. The approach is therefore based on the basic principle of reusing as much information as possible, and in parallel provide benefits on all levels, from the individual researcher to the management level at the EC.

HealthCompetence.eu reuses information from a row of sources, with project information from the EC as a starting point. To include information on the projects' results HealthCompetence.eu is connected to PubMed for publications and the European Patent Office (EPO) for patent information. This information is then quality assured through validation processes on different levels, from the individual researcher to the EC. HealthCompetence.eu gives in this way research organisations and individual researchers, both within Europe and internationally, versatile possibilities to access and reuse the most complete and accurate information available on EC-funded projects.