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Launch of CALIBER collaborative Big Health Data Grand Challenge

15 February 2017

 

The UCL Institute of Health Informatics, the Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research and the Denaxas Lab are delighted to announce our first Big Health Data Grand Challenge for collaborative research using linked electronic health record data from the CALIBER resource.

Primary aim of the challenge

The primary aim of the Challenge is to foster collaboration between disciplines in pursuit of novel research using big health data. We are inviting cross-disciplinary teams from across UCL faculties to submit proposals for access to CALIBER resources, normally costing £20k, including linked general practice, hospital inpatient data and national death registry data, to carry out a research project of their choice for free. Teams should be composed of members (at any level of seniority) from at least two UCL faculties and may include UCL Partners. 

Research projects should be grounded in one of the following themes but can cover any topic within them: discovery science, precision medicine or public health. Proposals will be reviewed in terms of scientific rigour and impact by a cross-faculty panel and the winning team will be granted access to CALIBER data, methods and tools subject to the conditions of entry (below) being met.    

Deadline for submissions is Wednesday 12 April 2017, 5:00pm.  

Applications should be submitted by email to n.fitzpatrick@ucl.ac.uk.

Conditions of entry and provision of CALIBER data

  • Projects must address a novel research question that can be answered using the data available in CALIBER. 
  • All projects are conditional to approval by the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Independent Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC), the independent body responsible for providing anonymised electronic health record (EHR) data for research.
  • Projects must be grounded in one of the following three themes: Discovery science, precision medicine or public health but can cover any topic within them i.e. disease epidemiology, methodological research, or hypothesis generating studies. 
  • Projects must be based on collaboration across at least two different UCL faculty disciplines (for example UCL Institute for Women’s Health and UCL Department of Computer Science).
  • The main affiliation of the principal investigator must be UCL. Investigator teams may include academic or clinical staff (at any level of seniority) and may include partnership with the NHS or government agencies.
  • At least one member of the research team must have statistical expertise in analysing large datasets consisting of >1 million records. 
  • Investigators must agree to abide by the CALIBER terms of data access and the winning project team must sign the CALIBER data access & non-disclosure agreement and individual declaration of use.   
  • Academic outputs including peer-reviewed journal publications and scientific conference abstracts must acknowledge the CALIBER resource but there will be no restrictions in terms of outputs.   
  • Investigators must agree to undertake UCL information governance and data safe haven training and data will be accessed within the UCL data safe haven.