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NIBHI

Northwest Institute for BioHealth Informatics

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Building capacity across Bioinformatics, Health Informatics and Public Health, to realise e-Health
   

e-Health research at NIBHI

NIBHI forges e-Health research across biological, clinical and social domains.

The central research programme is known as 'North West e-Health e-Labs'. An e-Lab is a secure environment for aggregating and analysing health-related data from natural health communities. In the UK, Primary Care Trust populations are an example of a natural community and economy. The methodological goal of e-Labs is to enable the large-scale, realistically complex epidemiology and intervetional studies that are impractical with current research methods.

Some examples of our research projects are:

  • e-Health+ (EPSRC): A research cluster/network to envision the research needs to enable a more citizen-led approach to improving health.

  • Obesity e-Lab (ESRC): Development and applications of e-infrastructure to bring social and biomedical science data, methods and investigators into an efficient focus on obesity research.

  • PsyGrid (MRC & DH): This started as an  e-cohort study with e-trials mounted on it to enable understanding of first episode psychosis to move to earlier stages of the disease(s). PsyGrid software is now the e-infrastructure for the Mental Health Research Network and allied NHS research networks, and has been selected as the trials management system to support NHS Biomedical Research Centres.

  • IMPACT (MRC): A fusion of informatics, epidemiology and economics research to provide scenario planning tools for health policy, starting with the application to cardiovascular diseases.

  • Obesity Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics (NHS): A series of projects using routinely collected data to provide new insights into the obesity epidemic and the public health measures to tackle it.

  • Shared Genomics (Microsoft): Improving Genomic Epidemiology through i) methematical development; ii) provision of computational tools acessible to clinical researchers.

  • Epidemiological collaborative visualisation (EPSRC): A project exploring ontologies and collaborative visualisation methods for epidemiology, with applications including the spatial or temporospatial health data.

  • Salford and Wirral e-Lab Pilot Studies (NHS & AstraZeneca): A series of opportunisic studies leveraging the advanced e-care records linked across primary and secondary care in the Salford (220K) and Wirral (330K) populations of Northwest England. Findings in child obesity, diabetes care, chronic kidney disease and critical care have been made using routinely-collected data.

  • Cholesterol vs. Inflammation (BBSRC & NHS): Linking animal and human studies in real time: Linkage of animal studies to e-lab based human studies to explore the relationships between cholesterol metabolism and inflammation - early successful transfer discovery has been achieved from trypanosomiasis in cattle to critical care in humans.