UCLH Health Informatics Collaborative Programme version 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
University College London Hospitals Health Informatics Collaborative Programme for Data Extraction and Sharing version 1
IRAS ID
156572
Contact name
Bryan Williams
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London Hospitals
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
This project is part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Informatics Collaborative, a government-funded national programme to create the information technology capability to use routine electronic patient records for research. It involves sharing research data among biomedical research centres (teaching hospitals and associated universities) including University College London (UCL) / University College London Hospitals (UCLH), King's College, Imperial College, Cambridge and Oxford.
There is much information routinely collected on patients admitted to hospitals or seen as outpatients, such as diagnoses and laboratory results, and this information could potentially be useful to answer research questions which will help to improve the care of future patients. However, it has previously been difficult to access this information for research, and previous studies have tended to be limited to a single hospital. By combining data from a number of hospitals, this project will enable studies to be more powerful and provide more precise answers to research questions.
The programme aims to showcase this new informatics capability by initially answering research questions in the disease areas of critical care (covered by a separate ethics application), heart disease, viral hepatitis, ovarian cancer and renal transplantation. (UCL is not participating in the renal transplantation project and the critical care project is covered by a separate ethics application.)
This ethics application refers specifically to the process for using anonymous UCLH electronic patient records for research (stripped of identifying information such as names, addresses and NHS numbers), analysing these records by university researchers at UCL and sharing them with other universities in the programme. It does not refer to the creation of a specific research database, or to collection of data from other hospitals. The project will involve rigorous governance procedures to ensure maintenance of privacy while gaining maximal research benefit from the data.
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/NW/0560
Date of REC Opinion
25 Jun 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion