EP 140: The future of Electronic Health Records and data analysis with Ben Goldacre

0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast

1:00 Welcome to Ben Goldacre

02:22 Ben’s open data projects at the Bennett Institute and the challenges they aim to tackle

04:03 Using Electronic Health Records (EHR) to help the National Health Service improve care

06:18 The importance of software development within healthcare data and how to manage salary scales in this relatively new field

08:20 The OpenSAFELY platform: The challenges of data security vs usability

14:47 Diverse opinions on which types of health data should be sharable and how to manage privacy and anonymity

17:46 How to grant access to data while protecting privacy

19:23 Using randomly generated “dummy” data to build and test code and statistical models

20:26 How synthetic data has been used to protect privacy

28:16 The challenges of working with, and analysing, Electronic Health data

30:46 The fact that just 2% of all health data research papers share their code

33:32 Idiosyncrasies of EHR analysis including data inconsistencies and challenges of coding variables within research silos

35:03 Building EHRQL (Electronic Health Records Query Language) to drive standardisation

37:47 OpenSAFELY as a portable, open-source set of data analysis tools including data preparation

38:21 Applications of the OpenSAFELY framework outside of the UK

40:22 How standardisation and domain specific language for data preparation encourages high-quality, unified code

45:10 Ben’s career arc, from public-facing roles to a return to research

51:00 Closing remarks

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