What’s in a name?

Electronic Healthcare Records are a vital source of data for a wide range of research, ranging from the implementation of new medical devices to the investigation of cures for disease. However, this data cannot just be made available to anyone, a written request must be vetted and approved, appropriate data must be extracted and anonymised and finally the anonymised data must be deposited in a secure location i.e. the whole process and the data itself must be SAFE. 

What is SAFEHR?

SAFEHR (pronounced simply as safer) is a cross institutional collaboration between University College London Hospital and ARC whose primary goal is to support healthcare researchers at UCL and the hospital.

Data for research

We facilitate researchers requiring data by providing a single point of contact for their requests for multimodal data from the hospital. In order to achieve this we have developed 

• An online form which captures all the necessary information for an application for data
• OMOP-ES – a tool that given a cohort extracts the data in the The OMOP Common Data Model
• PIXL – a pipeline for extracting images from the hospital systems 
• A pipeline to anonymize free text notes using Cogstack
• Code that links all these together and delivers them to the Data Safe Haven
• • • •  

Data for education

We have also been instrumental in establishing a process and set of guidelines for the use of this data in Education. Students doing courses that may require healthcare data will in future be able to use data that is realistic.

Data for anyone

Working with a project developed by the Turing Institute we are working on a pipeline that will produce a synthetic set of any data we extract that can be made publicly available for anybody to use.

Data we can provide

Records	Images	Reports
Demographics	X-rays	Radiology
Admissions	MRI	MS Clinicians notes
Measurements	CT (coming soon)
much more…

Have you noticed it’s all about the data!!

The SAFEHR Launch

SAFEHR was officially launched on December 4th 2024 to an audience of about 50 people including some prestigious names from both UCL and UCLH. We presented all aspects of our pipeline from making an inquiry, browsing our data catalogue, getting approval to actually receiving data. The slides from the presentation are available and you can find more information on our website

 

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding support from UCL, the UCLH Biomedical Research Centre, the Institute of Neurology, Dementia Research Institute and projects led by Prof. Gary Royle and Dr Arman Eshaghi.             

Research by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free