Have you ever wondered how researchers turn raw health data into groundbreaking insights? At the BHF Data Science Centre, our Health Data Science (HDS) team plays a key role in making this possible. Early Career Health Data Scientist Fionna Chalmers reveals all in this blog.
Meet the Health Data Science Team
Our team brings together experts in data engineering, analytics, and clinical research, all working together to solve the complex challenges of health data. We come from a variety of backgrounds. Some of us are problem-solvers who love building tools and pipelines, while others bring research expertise to shape study design and interpretation, and some are health data specialists with a deep understanding of clinical datasets.
We’re big believers in team science, not just within our own group but across the wider research community. Working closely with researchers across the UK and beyond, we help streamline studies, share expertise, and ensure that data-driven research is as effective as possible.
What we do
Our mission is to transform ‘messy’ health data into an accessible, powerful resource for cardiovascular research and beyond. By offering data management, curation, and analysis support, along with a suite of technical tools and troubleshooting skills, we help researchers move their projects forward with confidence.
Health data holds immense potential, but making sense of it isn’t always straightforward. When you bring together records from GP visits, hospital stays, and prescriptions across an entire population, you unlock deeper insights into diseases that affect diverse groups and even open the door to studying rare conditions.
But here’s the challenge: health data isn’t handed to researchers in a neatly wrapped package. It’s often spread across different systems, stored in various formats, and locked away in different environments. These hurdles can slow down data access and research. That’s where your friendly health data scientists come to help.
Our mission is to remove these barriers. We make high-quality, linked health data easier to access and use, so researchers can focus on what really matters – advancing cardiovascular science and improving lives.
Collaborating with researchers
We help researchers make the most of large-scale health data by ensuring it’s well-organised, high-quality, and ready for analysis. Our work involves cleaning, structuring, and linking data from different sources so researchers can focus on what matters most – their research questions – without getting dragged down by technical headaches.
We support scientists at many points in the research process, from feasibility assessments and study planning to data preparation and interpretation. Whether researchers are new to working with health data or highly experienced, we offer expert guidance to make their work more efficient, reproducible, and impactful.
Ultimately, our goal is to make research faster, more reliable, and more inclusive. By tackling the complexities of population-wide data, we help researchers unlock valuable insights that can improve health outcomes for everyone.
Impact
Our team’s work makes research that informs policy and improves healthcare outcomes possible. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our support helped reveal that nearly half a million people in the UK missed out on vital heart medications, highlighting the urgent need to address gaps in cardiovascular care.
In another study, we supported the creation of a detailed map showing regional variations in the prescribing of sodium valproate, an epilepsy drug linked to birth defects, uncovering inequalities in access to safer treatments for women of childbearing age.
Our work also contributed to research showing an elevated risk of life-threatening blood clots following COVID-19, even for non-hospitalised cases, emphasising the importance of post-COVID monitoring and preventative care.
These studies demonstrate how unlocking the potential of population-wide health data can drive impactful discoveries and support more equitable healthcare.
Our tools and resources
We’ve developed a suite of tools and resources to support researchers in making the most of routine health data. Each one plays a unique role in streamlining research and enhancing reproducibility. We’ll introduce these tools in more detail in upcoming articles, highlighting how they can support different stages of the research process.
Get involved
If you’re a researcher looking to harness the power of health data for your studies, explore our tools on GitHub or get in touch – we’re always keen to collaborate and support research that drives progress in cardiovascular science and beyond.
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