Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), in collaboration with data analytics firm SAS, released 45 years of cardiovascular patient records for secondary analysis.
In addition to boosting research in the field of cardiovascular research, the initiative hopes that the release serves as an example for how academia could make similar stores of data available for research.
Currently, there is not a lot of data with the ability to answer long-term solutions available to researchers, says Eric Peterson, MD, executive director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. He says he wants DCRI to
be a “role model for other institutions to do the same.”
The cardiovascular dataset is part of the Duke Databank for Cardiovascular Disease (DDCD), which includes de-identified records for patients treated at Duke between 1969 and 2013, including data from more than 100,000 procedures on more than 50,000 unique patients. The data includes patient demographics, cardiac medical history, comorbid conditions, final impressions and subsequent treatments.
Matt Gross, director of the SAS Health Care and Life Sciences Global Practice, says Duke Clinical Research Institute is the first outside the pharmaceutical realm to share data with the “dirtiness of the real world” at this level. He explains that the data shows patient history and how they responded to certain surgeries or medicine, making it broader than “sterile” clinical trial data that only represents a subset of the population that has already been included and excluded for a specific purpose.
“It’s valuable because it provides a different perspective,” he says. ‘You see how healthcare interacts with the real world.”