[Re: https://www.hifa.org/dgroups-rss/bridging-health-information-gap-low-res... ]
Uzodinma,
England is at a different and more advanced stage of digital maturity to Sub-Saharan Africa but it may be worth introducing the work of Ben Goldacre at Oxford University. Ben Goldacre | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science [ https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/about-us/ben-goldacre/ ] Ben has overseen the creation of openSAFELY which is a fully open source and highly secure analytics platform for NHS data created during the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform has emerged after decades of digital processing of personal health data for clinical care and has required years of professional, press, public, and government conversations and relationships. A dynamic balance is required between patient privacy, confidentiality, the need to know, the requirements for data for planning and investing, central government, politics, and the private sector.
==
Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine
Director of Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science
Ben is a doctor, academic, writer, and broadcaster. He trained in medicine at Oxford and UCL, in psychiatry at the Maudsley, and in epidemiology at LSHTM. His academic and policy work is in informatics, epidemiology and evidence-based medicine, where he works on various problems including variation in care, better uses of routinely collected electronic health data, evidence-based social policy, access to clinical trial data, efficient trial design, and retracted papers.
He runs the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science. This is a multidisciplinary team of academics, clinicians and software developers, all pooling skills and knowledge to turn large datasets into tools and services as well as pure academic research papers.
OpenSAFELY [ https://www.opensafely.org/ ] is a fully open source and highly secure analytics platform for NHS data created during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is currently executing code across an unprecedented scale of data: 58 million patients full raw GP records - 70 billion rows of information - linked onto various other sources including SGSS, SUS/HES, ECDS, ISARIC, ICNARC, ONS death, and more. All code for the platform, and for data management and analysis of each output, is shared under open licenses for review and re-use. OpenSAFELY has delivered a range of outputs in journals such as Nature, Lancet and the BMJ from a large national academic collaboration.
OpenPrescribing [ https://openprescribing.net/ ] is a live, freely accessible explorer for 8,000 individual NHS GP practices’ prescribing data: it implements cutting edge data science techniques in a real working tool which serves over 150,000 unique users a year, and thousands of subscribers receiving regular context alerts on changes in their prescribing behaviour. Alongside this tool the Bennett Institute have also rapidly delivered a substantial body of work describing variation in prescribing behaviour across the NHS, and the drivers of practice change.
The TrialsTracker [ https://www.trialstracker.net/ ] is a range of automated online tools monitoring the reporting status of all clinical trials, with papers in the BMJ and Lancet; its sister project COMPare Trials [ https://www.compare-trials.org/ ] monitors detailed data on outcomes within reported clinical trials.
==
HIFA profile: Richard Fitton is a retired family doctor - GP. Professional interests: Health literacy, patient partnership of trust and implementation of healthcare with professionals, family and public involvement in the prevention of modern lifestyle diseases, patients using access to professional records to overcome confidentiality barriers to care, patients as part of the policing of the use of their patient data Email address: richardpeterfitton7 AT gmail.com