Clinical Data Search Service for Researchers
4 February 2015
A BRAND new service allowing clinical researchers at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation to gather useful information from the majority of electronic data held within the Trust has been launched by the clinical research systems team (CReST).
Utilising our powerful research data warehouse (PHInD), data scientists in our team will help you identify cohorts of patients with a level of specificity impossible to achieve until now.
What is it for?
There are three main uses for the service:
- Feasibility – historic patient counts based on criteria you provide can give you a more accurate idea of the size of the potential target patient pool.
- Recruitment – patient lists based on inclusion/exclusion criteria to help study teams identity eligible patients1. This could help you meet the NIHR 70 day First Patient Recruited and Recruitment to Time & Target benchmarks.
- Data Collection – for recruited/consented patients, lists of specific data for use in your trial (eg a list of lab values)1.
Examples of recent queries:
“How many Gastroenterology patients were admitted since May 2012 with White Cell Count <= 2.5 and diagnosed with Crohns Disease or Ulcerative Colitis.”
“For Metabolic Bone outpatients who attended between Sept 2012 and Mar 2013 and who had PINP and NTX lab tests in that period, list their local diagnosis code.”
What data is available for searching?
Most data sets include historic data for at least the last 5 years. Current data sets include:
Patient Demographics (Age, Sex, Date of Death)
Inpatient Admissions (including length of stay)
Inpatient Diagnostic Coding (ICD10)
Inpatient Procedure Coding (OPCS)
A&E Activity
Outpatient Attendances
Radiology Attendances
Lab Results - Haematology/Clinical Biochemistry/Microbiology
Infoflex2
ArQ3
How to use it
To get started send your search request or enquires about what is possible to Thomas.butterfield@sth.nhs.uk. Please give as much information as possible about your criteria and include the STH project number if requesting patient data. We will return the results to you by email. Please note that due to limited resources, requests will be dealt with on a first come first served basis. The service will run as a pilot until spring 2015.
1For searches that return patient data, checks will be carried out against your projects information governance risk assessment/ethics and R&D approval. Patient data can only be transmitted within the STH network.
2Fields from your Infoflex view can be added to PHInD but there is a lead time of a few weeks associated with this.
3For those departments who have specialty specific ArQ databases these data can be added to PHInD upon request.
