5 September 2023

Introduction to health data standardisation

The amount of health data required to address critical questions continuously grows in research and healthcare. New technologies have made it possible to create large health datasets, collected from all over the world and across numerous organisations. These technologies include digitising medical tools, accumulating electronic health records (EHRs), and lower-cost genome sequencing.

These vast datasets can provide important insights that may ultimately enhance lives. Recent groundbreaking studies that illustrate the power of big data in health research include:

• the 100,000 Genomes study on rare diseases.
• research reporting the host characteristics triggering severe COVID-19 on approximately 60,000 participants.
• research confirming that high blood pressure is a risk factor for dementia- here, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us database of EHRs on +125,000 participants was utilised.

However, to be able to use all this valuable data in analysis, it must first be standardised and made interoperable in order to accurately combine data from multiple sources.

This article specifically focuses on the clinical challenges associated with health data transformation, and the solutions to connect high quality datasets, to inform clinical decision making and progress life sciences research.

What are the challenges surrounding clinical data standardisation?

Health data transformation is crucial for ensuring consistency, interoperability, and quality of data across different systems and institutions. However, there are several challenges that include:

Identifying solutions to connect high-quality datasets

Common Data Models (CDMs) are being increasingly utilised in the healthcare sector to overcome the lack of consistency in health data. Collaborative health research on data across nations, sources, and systems is made possible by the standard approach. Examples include the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) CDM and Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) medical standards.

What is OMOP?

OMOP is an open community data standard created to standardise observational data formats and content and to facilitate quick analyses. The OHDSI standardised vocabulary is a key part of the OMOP CDM. The OHDSI vocabularies enable standard analytics and allow the organisation and standardisation of medical terms to be used across the various clinical domains of the OMOP CDM.

What is CDISC?

CDISC creates data standards for the gathering, analysing, and sharing of clinical trial data in conjunction with a wide spectrum of international professionals. Researchers, pharmaceutical and biotech firms, governmental organisations (such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA), and the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA)), and technology suppliers all utilise CDISC standards. The standards help to make data more easily accessible, interoperable, and reusable so that clinical research and global health can be improved.

Featured resource: Read our whitepaper on Lifebit’s approach to data standardisation

To leverage a breadth of health data types, both clinical trial and non-clinical trial health data, researchers must transform these datasets to CDMs. However, this is time consuming and costly, with data scientists estimated to devote 80% of their work to organising and cleaning data.

Researchers should be able to spend time on what matters most - analysis that will derive meaningful insights to benefit the lives of patients.

To empower researchers to effectively collaborate over their data, industry providers are now offering support services for the standardisation of data to CDMs. This saves researchers’ time and effort, with providers offering fully-dedicated, expert teams that have developed proprietary ETL pipelines to streamline the standardisation process while maintaining data quality standards. Working with providers who are experts in both the standardisation of clinical trial and observational data types can help connect these datasets for a variety of use cases, powering clinical and research breakthroughs.

*Image adapted from CDISC 2019 Europe Interchange

Finally, throughout the process of data standardisation, data security and patient privacy should always remain a primary concern.

When data is moved, for example to provide to an industry partner to standardise the data, it can become vulnerable to interception (and furthermore the movement of large datasets is often very costly). Trusted research environments and data federation allow virtual access to the data through Application Program Interfaces (APIs), avoiding moving or copying the data.

By using this approach, data can be standardised and made interoperable for collaborative research without compromising security.

Summary

Health data comes from various sources and exists in multiple formats. Combining this data to gain novel insights can only be achieved if the data is made interoperable. Standardising health datasets requires overcoming clinical challenges related to resources, technological capabilities and data governance to safely empower data consumers to maximise research insights and discoveries.

Look out for the next blog in our series, where we will describe further, specific benefits that standardisation of health data can bring to researchers and clinicians.

Once data is standardised, users can bring standardised analytical tools to where the data resides in its secure environment. However, access to and analysis of the data must also be harmonised to maximise insights that can be gained.

Author: Hadley E. Sheppard, PhD

Contributors: Hannah Gaimster, PhD and Amanda White

About Lifebit

Lifebit provides health data standardisation services for clients, including Genomics England, Boehringer Ingelheim, Flatiron Health and more, to help researchers transform data into discoveries.

Lifebit’s services are making health data usable quickly.  

Find out more about the value of data standardisation at our upcoming webinar, Data Harmony, on 14 September 2023. Secure your place today. 

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