University of Edinburgh

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

DL_2023_061

The use of hospital data has significantly expanded in the past years to better understand treatment patterns and patients’ characteristics. Comparing treatment and outcomes between hospitals is an important method of ensuring good standards of care. Undertaking studies that compare between hospitals, particularly between countries, remains a significant challenge due to data privacy concerns. “Federated” analysis, where hospitals can work together to complete the same analysis and share aggregate results while data never leaves the hospitals’ servers, allows robust multi-centre data-analysis to be undertaken without any need for data sharing. In an effort to facilitate the above process, the OHDSI network has developed the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM). Once hospitals have formatted their data to this common, standardised CDM, an algorithm can be run by each hospital and share the report with other sites. This means than no individual patient data is leaving the hospitals, and the reports contain summaries only which means that the patients cannot be identified. The results are additionally checked by each sites’ disclosure guidelines before being shared. This project is led from the UK by the National Institute for Care Excellence (NICE). It is looking at the example of how cancer survival differs between different European hospitals. Participation will allow us, NHS Lothian, as part of the DataLoch initiative to test our recently mapped breast cancer data and test our local processes needed to support federated analysis in a safe manner.

This project will retrospectively describe cancer survival across different European sites and will allow us, NHS Lothian, to test our recently mapped breast cancer OMOP data. The project is led by NICE and supported by the European health Data Evidence Network (EHDEN). About 6600 NHS Lothian patients with breast cancer fit the criteria of this study. Federated analysis of this nature is seen as a key method for the future that avoids data privacy risks through the avoidance of data sharing. Enabling NHS Lothian to participate in federated analyses means that we can include Scottish patients in European studies and ensure a good representation of our patients, thus informing the design of NHS Cancer Services through international benchmarking. The outputs of this project will contribute to The ‘EHDEN Cancer Survival Data Dashboard’, a user-friendly tool, and will be used by researchers worldwide to quickly examine survival data and natural history projections based on parametric survival functions.

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27/11/2023

Anonymous

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