12 April 2023

Lifebit is supporting Genomics England as one of 22 new data partners across Europe selected by EHDEN (European Health Data Evidence Network) in their recent funding call to support the adoption of standards and improve use of data for research and innovation. The goal is to use data more effectively to enable better health decisions, outcomes and care for patients and populations. 

The project with Genomics England and supported and funded by Health Data Research UK will enhance the usability and interoperability of clinical data within Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project and COVID-19 study. These rich data sources hold cancer and rare disease clinical data, which have enabled hundreds of research projects, many high-impact publications and led to numerous global collaborations.

As partners of the EHDEN consortium, Lifebit and Genomics England will standardise and map high priority datasets to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model; a model widely used by leading biobanks, research institutions and pharmaceutical companies. This will enable more complex querying of the data by approved researchers who have access to the Genomics England Trusted Research Environment (TRE). Implementing OMOP will further enhance the secure re-use of these data within the Genomics England TRE, and enable interoperability across different data assets to increase the scale of population data for research by facilitating methods of privacy-preserving data federation. 

The OMOP common data model, developed by the Observational Health Data Sciences (OHDSI) community, is based on the concept of harmonising disparate data sources by transforming them to a common format and using a standard set of vocabularies so they can be analysed using a library of standard analytic pipelines. 

Parker Moss, Chief Ecosystems and Partnership Officer at Genomics England, said: “Genomics England strongly supports improved mechanisms of privacy-preserving, secure, data interoperability across the UK ecosystem. By growing and improving the widespread utility of clinical data for research, we are making huge strides in providing improved genetic diagnosis and patient care.”

Thorben Seeger, Chief Business Development Officer at Lifebit, said: “We are proud to deepen our partnership with Genomics England further and to support EHDEN’s mission of harmonising health data to enable research breakthroughs. Using Lifebit’s technology and domain expertise to map clinical data that can be difficult to compare to this leading common data model will support researchers to leverage the full depth of this dataset and combine it with other global data resources.”

EHDEN, led by the Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and 12 pharmaceutical partners, was established in response to the volume of real-world health data available in Europe today and the associated challenges this brings with respect to policy, regulatory and technology considerations. EHDEN’s mission is to accelerate research through insights generated from use of real-world health data. To do so, it aims to create a network of partners across Europe who collaborate on research methodologies, tools and standards to enable federated data analytics. Together, the EHDEN partners represent over 830 million patient records, originating from various care settings across Europe.  

Lifebit has deep experience in developing and running federated analyses and is certified by EHDEN in the standardisation of clinical data to the OMOP common data model. 

Lifebit and Genomics England’s application was one of 158 projects submitted to EHDEN in the recent funding call, with 22 selected for funding. All applications were reviewed and selected by an independent Data Source Prioritisation Committee (DSPC).

Find out more about Lifebit’s approach to data standardisation.

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