Publications by authors named "Chris Orton"
Article Synopsis
- Federated networks enhance data privacy by allowing analysis without transferring sensitive data, supporting trustworthy data analysis in healthcare research.
- The International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) tested a federated network with partners to analyze data from the International Perinatal Outcome in the Pandemic (iPOP) Study, facing both challenges and benefits in the process.
- Establishing these networks requires significant investment and planning for technology and governance, which can lead to powerful collaborative research opportunities using health data from various countries.
Article Synopsis
- * A harmonized curation approach was developed to create comparable patient groups across different datasets from England, Wales, and Scotland, addressing inconsistencies in data coding.
- * Tools and resources, including codelists and metadata, have been provided to assist researchers in recreating these patient cohorts in various EHR systems, facilitating future respiratory research.
Article Synopsis
- Trusted Research Environments (TREs) aim to facilitate secure data access while adhering to the "five-safes" framework for privacy, though there is inconsistency in how these frameworks are applied across different TREs in the UK.
- The study focuses on documenting governance features of major UK-TREs to enhance collaborative analyses and future multi-TRE collaborations.
- Key findings show that all 15 TREs analyzed require human-operated disclosure checks for data pooling, have distinct access request procedures, and varying levels of disclosure control guidance, with only 40% achieving ISO 20071 accreditation as of 2023.
Article Synopsis
- Preterm birth (PTB) is a major cause of infant mortality globally, and studies show mixed results regarding its rates during COVID-19 lockdowns, with changes ranging from -90% to +30%.
- Analysis of data from 52 million births in 26 countries indicates modest reductions in PTB rates during the first three months of lockdown, but no significant changes in the fourth month.
- High-income countries showed an increase in stillbirth risk during the first month of lockdown, with Brazil experiencing increased stillbirth rates throughout the entire lockdown period, highlighting the need for further investigation into these trends.
Background: COVID-19 data have been generated across the United Kingdom as a by-product of clinical care and public health provision, as well as numerous bespoke and repurposed research endeavors. Analysis of these data has underpinned the United Kingdom's response to the pandemic, and informed public health policies and clinical guidelines. However, these data are held by different organizations, and this fragmented landscape has presented challenges for public health agencies and researchers as they struggle to find relevant data to access and interrogate the data they need to inform the pandemic response at pace.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which emerged in December 2019, has caused millions of deaths and severe illness worldwide. Numerous vaccines are currently under development of which a few have now been authorised for population-level administration by several countries. As of 20 September 2021, over 48 million people have received their first vaccine dose and over 44 million people have received their second vaccine dose across the UK.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Chest drain displacement is a common clinical problem that occurs in 9-42% of cases and results in treatment failure or additional pleural procedures conferring unnecessary risk. A novel chest drain with an integrated intrapleural balloon may reduce the risk of displacement.
Methods: A prospective randomised controlled trial comparing the balloon drain to standard care (12 F chest drain with no balloon) with the primary outcome of objectively defined unintentional or accidental chest drain displacement.
Introduction: COVID-19 has spread rapidly worldwide, causing significant morbidity and mortality. People from ethnic minorities, particularly those working in healthcare settings, have been disproportionately affected. Current evidence of the association between ethnicity and COVID-19 outcomes in people working in healthcare settings is insufficient to inform plans to address health inequalities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for robust data linkage systems and methods for identifying outbreaks of disease in near real-time. Objectives The primary objective of this study was to develop a real-time geospatial surveillance system to monitor the spread of COVID-19 across the UK. Methods Using self-reported app data and the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank, we demonstrate the use of sophisticated spatial modelling for near-real-time prediction of COVID-19 prevalence at small-area resolution to inform strategic government policy areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The emergence of the novel respiratory SARS-CoV-2 and subsequent COVID-19 pandemic have required rapid assimilation of population-level data to understand and control the spread of infection in the general and vulnerable populations. Rapid analyses are needed to inform policy development and target interventions to at-risk groups to prevent serious health outcomes. We aim to provide an accessible research platform to determine demographic, socioeconomic and clinical risk factors for infection, morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, to measure the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare utilisation and long-term health, and to enable the evaluation of natural experiments of policy interventions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The Information Aggregation (IA) component manages streaming and batch data deriving from a multitude sources in a scalable, efficient and reliable way to create Holistic Health Records (HHRs).Within this context, the IA component combines a number of diverse data sources into a common format and stores information in an available form to be used for analytics, simulations and decision making.
Aim: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the CrowdHEALTH project and the technical architecture of the CrowdHEALTH platform in order to put the aforementioned IA mechanism in context.