Assembling the Data Jigsaw: improving MSK research using hospital data
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Assembling the Data Jigsaw in Salford: improving MSK research to advance patient care and inform patient policy using hospital data
IRAS ID
296349
Contact name
William Dixon
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The University of Manchester
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 5 months, days
Research summary
Assembling the Data Jigsaw is a research programme bringing together pre-existing and novel health data to answer questions about arthritis that are important to patients. The programme is funded by the Oliver Bird Fund (Nuffield Foundation)
The programme will address problems of missing, unstructured and siloed data.. New data sources will be linked to existing hospital and GP records, ensuring the best methods for maintaining public trust are used. Each new piece of data collection, processing or linkage will aim to answer clinically important research questions about musculoskeletal disease that have previously been difficult to address, such as:
• How common is it for people to be diagnosed with this particular type of arthritis?
• Are there ways of speeding up the time it takes to be diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis?
• What are the benefits and possible harms of certain painkillers?
This part of the programme aims to:
1. Identify cases of MSK disease in hospital outpatient records – using text mining to extract this information from free text patient letters and documents
2. Establish the number of cases of MSK disease in hospital outpatients – to provide estimated numbers of diagnoses. We will describe the number and rate of disease cases overall, and stratified by important determinants of disease burden (eg age, sex)
3. Evaluate the comparative safety of hospital prescribed opioids in older adults - To quantify the comparative risk of delirium and the comparative risk of constipation in older adults prescribed an opioid for non-cancer pain.
This part of the programme will take place in the Greater Manchester area for an 18-month period. The research is undertaken using retrospective inpatient and outpatient hospital data. The data will be prepared by hospital staff who will make it available as a de-identified dataset in a secure and highly restricted data platform.REC name
East Midlands - Leicester South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/EM/0147
Date of REC Opinion
9 Jul 2021
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion