Purpose of the post

The Data-Enabled Clinical Trials thematic area is making it easier for researchers and clinicians to safely and securely access and use electronic health records (EHRs) within their clinical trial, which supports the running of time and cost-efficient trials. One of the key challenges identified by clinical trial teams is how to define commonly used cardiovascular outcomes (phenotypes) within EHRs and how to provide and share these definitions. The Data-Enabled Clinical Trials thematic area is working collaboratively with the Defining Disease team to address this challenge, creating  the SCORE-CVD (Standardising Clinical Outcome measures in Routinely-collected Electronic healthcare systems data) project. SCORE-CVD will help to identify and create phenotyping algorithms (computable instructions that use the information contained within EHRs to define a specific clinical event/disease or characteristic) for priority cardiovascular trial outcomes.

The Defining Disease thematic area and SCORE-CVD project also aim to define community-agreed best practices for how phenotyping algorithms using EHR data should be derived, stored and shared, ensuring they adhere to the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.

The post-holder will play a key role in supporting the Data-Enabled Clinical Trials and Defining Disease thematic areas through the development of new phenotyping algorithms to derive outcome measures commonly used in cardiovascular clinical trials, adhering to best practices. This will involve working closely with cross-functional teams, pulling in expertise from experienced clinical cardiologists, clinical trialists and health data scientists and internally with the BHF Data Science Centre’s Health Data Science team, Research Project Managers and relevant Associate Directors. The post-holder will be required to perform analyses of linked EHR data for quality control purposes and to help better understand the utility of the data.

Additionally, the post-holder will have the opportunity to contribute to the broader work of the Health Data Science team, in particular the development and application of reproducible and reusable data curation pipelines to support projects using linked EHR data within the national secure data and trusted research environments to answer a wide variety of research questions.

This post presents an exciting career development opportunity, ideal for a health data/computer scientist with experience in data wrangling and curation of health data for research. Experience of phenotyping algorithm development and methods for validation would be beneficial. This role would suit a candidate who seek to expand their skills in supporting data-driven clinical trials and broader health data science projects with valuable networking opportunities within the field.

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