UK electronic health data for national and international health impact and research

UK phenomics platform for developing and validating electronic health record phenotypes: CALIBER

Many congratulations to Prof Spiros Denaxas and team whose paper has been selected by the HDR UK Impact Committee as an example of ‘significant Human Phenome impact’. The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, describes a UK electronic health record (EHR) phenomics approach within the CALIBER EHR data platform as an important step toward international use of UK EHR data for health research.

Denaxas and colleagues implement a rule-based phenotyping framework, with up to six approaches of validation, describing an approach for developing, validating, and sharing reproducible phenotypes from national structured electronic health records (EHR) in the UK, with applications for translational research. An EHR data sample of 15 million individuals was used in the framework with algorithms for 51 diseases, syndromes, biomarkers, and lifestyle risk factors. The phenotypes have been used by 40 national and international research groups in 60 peer-reviewed publications, confirming its value, and excellence and rigour in research.

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Denaxas leads the CALIBER resource, providing the research community with information, tools, and phenotyping algorithms for UK electronic health records data. These comprehensive, open-access algorithms are used to effectively indicate the presence of a specific disease and relevant data can then be accessed more quickly and converted into real-life improvements in care. To find out more about this unique research platform, visit the UCL webpage and CALIBER website.