Critical Care Health Informatics Collaborative
Research type
Research Database
IRAS ID
148894
Contact name
Mervyn Singer
Contact email
Research summary
Critical Care Health Informatics Collaborative
REC name
Confidentiality Advisory Group (Section 251)
REC reference
14/CAG/1001
Date of REC Opinion
30 Jun 2014
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion
Data collection arrangements
Routine electronic clinical and
demographic data will be automatically collected from the five participating NHS Trusts. This data will be assimilated in
an in house database before encryption and point to point transfer to a central Safe Haven database in University
College London. This Safe Haven meets the IT governance and security requirements to hold sensitive and identifiable
NHS data (NHS Information Governance Toolkit Level 2 and ISO27001). The data is linked, within the Safe Haven, to
the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database (held by the HSCIC) to provide the long term outcomes (mortality and
healthcare utilisation)that is central to the project. As the project aims to follow critical care survivors until their death the
HES database may be interrogated several times during the patients life. Once the patient has died the data will be deidentified.Research programme
Little is known about the long term survival or outcome of patients who have survived a critical illness, most previous research follows their acute admission but rarely look beyond hospital discharge. The linking of the proposed databases will bring benefit to a number of areas that are directly relevant to UK patients. 1) The patient. Long term outcomes and healthcare utilisation is vital if patients, or their proxy, are to make informed decisions over their care. This data is not currently available. 2)Clinicians will be able to evaluate the impact of interventions or process change on the longer term health of the critical care survivors. They will also be able to look at potential predictors of outcome enabling them to keep the patient or next of kin fully informed. 3)Commissioning groups. Knowing these outcomes will enable appropriate planning and anticipation of future healthcare needs. 4)Clinical trialists. All drug trials have failed to produce any reproducible benefit in critical care. The reasons behind this are multifactorial, but a poor understanding of the patient population is certainly a component. A highly comprehensive database would enable researchers to examine the impact of altering their trial entry criteria and look at different longer term endpoints. This would enable the trial to be appropriately powered and recruitment rates more accurately predicted.
Research database title
Critical Care Health Informatics Collaborative
Establishment organisation
University College London
Establishment organisation address
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT