The CMIH Hub Partnership Fund has been used to support pump-priming/scoping projects with new collaborations and funding. In the first of a series of articles about these projects Dr. Genevieve Cezard, Prof. Angela Wood and Prof. James Rudd explained how an award from the Partnership Fund aided their research.
Extracting and curating a Cardiovascular eHospital Rsearch Database (eCamCVD) from Cambridge University Hospitals
What made you decide to apply to the CMIH Partnership Fund?
The Partnership Fund administered by the CMIH seemed a really good fit for our project. The eCamCVD database project is designed to answer fundamental questions about the causes and consequences of major health conditions like heart attack and stroke. Despite advances in identifying people at risk and improving treatments, far too many people still suffer from these conditions.
What is the aim of your project?
The eCamCVD electronic healthcare record database will support research to answer important cardiovascular related medical, methodological and biological questions. Establishing this database will provide a framework in which to further our understanding and improve the prevention of cardiovascular diseases.
How did the Partnership Fund help to achieve those aims?
Such an undertaking needs input from multiple people, including patients and members of the public, data scientists, computer scientists, clinicians and researchers. The partnership funding has allowed us to institute weekly meetings to maximise progress and to fund members of the team that will extract data in a safe anonymised way, to get successful ethics approvals and institute the first projects relating to the database in stroke and heart failure.
How do the aims of the CMIH fit with/alongside your work?
The aims of the CMIH align well with our own, namely bringing together a diverse group of computer scientists, data experts clinicians, who would not normally necessarily work together. Harnessing the power of those groups allows us to answer bigger questions than we could if we remained working in our own silos.
What’s next for your project?
Getting the partnership award has already helped us to establish the database. Moreover, we hope to expand across the east of England and beyond leveraging additional funding from other sources, such as the British Heart Foundation and the EPSRC.
