9th February 2023

Harmonising Electronic Health Records For Reproducible Research: Challenges, Solution and Recommendations

THE UK-WIDE CARDIOVASCULAR COVID-19 RESEARCH COLLABORATION KNOWN AS THE CVD-COVID-UK CONSORTIUM HAS PUBLISHED NEW RESEARCH IN BMC MEDICAL INFORMATICS AND DECISION MAKING, DESCRIBING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EFFICIENT, TRANSPARENT, SCALABLE, AND REPRODUCIBLE HEALTH DATA HARMONISATION METHOD.

This new method enables multi-nation collaborative research across the UK’s Trusted Research Environments (TRE’s), highly secure computing environments that provide remote access to health and administrative data for approved researchers that can be used in research to improve lives.

The CVD-COVID-UK consortium was established by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK (HDR UK). The consortium aims to understand the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease through analyses of harmonised electronic health records (EHRs) across the four UK nations.

This research was led by the Population Data Science at Swansea University using anonymised data held within the SAIL Databank and NHS Digital TRE for England. The main linkable data sources included in this research are primary and secondary care data, critical and intensive care data, prescribing and dispensing records, COVID-19 testing and vaccination data, mortality records, maternity services and a range of other data sources.

To read the full article click here.