Building an environment to use data in innovative ways

Data is a necessary component in almost any healthcare research or innovation project. The Digital Research Environment (DRE) at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) plays a key role in these advancements. 

The DRE, part of the Data Research, Innovation and Virtual Environments (DRIVE) unit has supported over 250 projects in just 5 years.  

Dr Natassa Spiridou, Head of the DRE at GOSH explains our unique technical environment and how it supports data use and advanced analytics for health research and operational improvements. 

The DRE includes a secure, cloud-based digital research platform at its core. This is hosted by Aridhia, a healthcare research technology company. It works alongside the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system at GOSH. It also includes an application that captures data that are not recorded in the EPR, yet are essential in clinical trials, research studies and surveys.  

The DRE has advanced health research and innovation projects by providing: 

• easy, efficient and secure access to data that is quality assured by the creation of tools and processes to move and transform data, called pipelines, and can be automated to minimise human errors.
• a collaborative analysis environment, bringing researchers and clinicians together, even across national or international teams. 
• an easy-to-use and secure data collection capability that is safely accessible by healthcare organisations and other teams, as required by studies or surveys.

This vital infrastructure, supported by a team of data experts, means that researchers and clinical teams can best use their time focusing on their roles. For example, defining the questions that should be explored to solve an issue and interpreting results within the clinical context.  

The technical capability of the DRE allowed GOSH to collaborate with hospitals in the USA, Europe and Asia at the very start of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the 4CE consortium. This helped to understand how the new condition affected children and young people. We were able to extract relevant clinical data very efficiently, transform them in ways that were suitable for the collaboration, and analyse them locally before collating results from the different hospitals. 

The environment continues to be developed, adding support for international data standards that enable collaborations with hospitals and other organisations across the world, expanding our knowledge. This is particularly important for rare diseases in children and young people where data can be rare and spread across multiple site, countries and continents. The data processing pipelines also continue to be improved, becoming more scalable, automated and supporting more data types and advanced methods that ensure data protection.  

If you’d like to find out more, please visit www.goshdrive.com