Scott Horban, Senior Data Engineer, Health Informatics Centre (HIC), University of Dundee School of Medicine, Scotland, provides an overview of experience working with EHDEN as a Data Partner, for both mapping their records data to the OMOP CDM, and being involved in the first EHDEN Evidence-a-thon (e-thon).
HIC is both a service and an academic group, in the Tayside and Fife region, with 20% of the Scottish population represented, having supported ~GBP180mio of total grants over the last five years, with 600 separate research projects, working with over 2000 separate linked anonymised data extracts and bespoke software for over 50 research projects with ~40 experts in relevant fields from data science, informatics and machine learning, through to security. HIC worked with its most up-to-date dataset from 2009, but its datasets go as far as back as 1962, with demographic, hospital, primary care, and specialist sources.
Scott narrates the timeline of HIC’s involvement in EHDEN, in the first Data Partner call (2019) and extending via the COVID-19 Rapid call (2020), and have competed the mapping by February 2021 with external validation via a certified SME and then involvement in a research study in July, now currently involved in two more within EHDEN. HIC has mapped more than 1bn records including both the tables and vocabulary counts, and HIC has its proprietary RDMP, in-house, ETL tool to support mapping via individual table data loads, and expediting the monthly updates. For the research studies, Scott summarises the three studies HIC has or is contributing to, including the first e-thon, which utilised a prior AESI study for population trends for researching COVID-19 vaccines.