Big Data and Data Science in Scotland: An ssac discussion Document

A.2 Health and Medical Research

http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC008799%20

A consortium of 10 UK government and charity funders, led by the Medical Research Council (MRC), has made a historic £19 million investment to establish four e-health research Centres of Excellence in London, Manchester, Dundee and Swansea. … The Centres will open in late 2012 and will harness the wealth of UK electronic health records to improve patient care and public health.

The four Centres will investigate a wide range of conditions that place a huge burden on the UK population, including diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer and child and maternal health. Maximising the unique value of the NHS, the Centres will undertake cutting edge research that links e-health records with other forms of research and routinely collected data, which will lead to patient and public benefit and ensuring the UK remains at the forefront of global medical research. … The four Centres will make use of patient data sets available through the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, a £60 million service recently announced by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the National Institute for Health Research. The public and charitable funding for these Centres builds on this important commitment from the Government and on similar bodies that link patient records in Scotland and Wales.

Professor Andrew Morris, Dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Dundee and Chief Scientist at the Scottish Government Health Department said “Colleagues in Scotland are thrilled to be awarded Centre of Excellence status. This builds upon over 40 years’ experience of using electronic patient records not only to drive improvements in the quality of health care in Scotland, but also to innovate in the way we deliver clinical trials and discover the best treatment options for patients and communities. The spirit of collaboration between NHS Scotland and the Universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and Strathclyde has been tremendous. There is a great opportunity to make the United Kingdom the destination of choice of eHealth research, and in doing so help deliver the best quality health care to the people of Scotland."

The members of the E-Health Research Initiative who have jointly-funded the four Centres are: Arthritis Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the Chief Scientist Office (Scottish Government Health Directorates), the Economic and Social Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research, the National Institute for Social Care and Health Research (Welsh Government) and the Wellcome Trust.

Contact: Andrew Morris (Chief Scientist for Health, Scottish Government)

2. The Farr Institute

http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC009207

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/2013/july13/institute.htm

In July, it was announced that the Medical Research Council (MRC) will invest £20m capital funding in the establishment of a UK health informatics research institute, to be known as the Farr Institute. This investment will support the safe use of patient and research data for medical research across all diseases. The Institute’s independent research will support innovation in the public sector and industry leading to advances in preventative medicine, improvements in NHS care and better development of commercial drugs and diagnostics. It will also provide new insights into the understanding of causes of ill health which in turn will guide new biomedical research discovery. In addition to health benefits for patients and UK citizens, the Institute will help to cement the UK’s reputation as a world leader in research using large electronic health data.

The Farr Institute will have major centres in London, Dundee, Manchester and Swansea and will link research in 19 universities across the UK. It builds on the four e-health informatics research centres (eHIRCs) recently funded by a consortium of three Research Councils, three health departments and four leading medical research charities. …

Scotland is represented in the new Farr Institute by the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, St Andrews and Strathclyde and NHS Scotland. Their combined expertise will be coordinated from Dundee to support the safe use of patient and research data for medical research across all diseases. … High-quality space at Dundee’s School of Medicine will be refurbished to create an inter-disciplinary health informatics research environment, while new facilities will also be established at Edinburgh’s BioQuarter. Together these locations will act as the hub of the Scottish Institute. Additional networking and compute capability will be provisioned at the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow, working closely with their NHS partners. …

A total of £39 million has been invested in the Farr Institute. The concentration of funding in developing UK health informatics research base will provide a focus for collaborations with IT and pharmaceutical companies, attracting inward investment into the UK economy.

Contact: Andrew Morris (Chief Scientist for Health, Scottish Government)

3. ScottisH Informatics Programme

http://www.scot-ship.ac.uk

SHIP is an ambitious, Scotland-wide research platform for the collation, management, dissemination and analysis of Electronic Patient Records (EPRs). The programme brings together the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews with the Information Services Division (ISD) of NHS Scotland.

SHIP is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council and aims to:

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  Provide access to an exciting new national research facility, firmly embedded within and supported by NHS Scotland, providing the basis for numerous future studies using EPRs.
  
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  Create a research portal for EPRs already held by NHS Scotland that will provide rapid, secure, access to the type of data that clinical scientists require.
  
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  Develop and evaluate systems that work across institutional boundaries to allow linkage between large, federated, third party research datasets and the NHS research portal.
  

Finally, it is worth noting that medical imaging–such as neuroimaging–routinely generates significant amounts of unstructured image data, which may not yet count as big data, but which demands similar data science analytic skills as other branches of science and medicine.