QResearch, the not-for-profit research partnership between EMIS and the University of Nottingham, is supporting a new European-wide initiative, the ALERT project, to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) faster.
The project will involve a consortium of 18 leading European research institutions using clinical data from the electronic healthcare records (EHRs) of over 30m patients from European countries, including the Netherlands, Denmark, UK and Italy.
ALERT has received €5m funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme – Europe’s research programme for supporting innovations in core EU initiatives such as e-health.
In the UK, academics from the University of Nottingham will use the QResearch database, which houses anonymous data from around 10m patients. Other institutions including the Arhus University Hospital in Denmark, Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, and the University of Santigao de Compostela in Spain, will analyse their own respective databases to try to identify common drug reaction trends.
QResearch project leader, Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox of the University of Nottingham, told EHI Primary Care: “ALERT will, for the first time, design, develop and set up a process for monitoring adverse drug reactions for a significant proportion of the European population. Teams of academic researchers will use biomedical informatics technologies to do this, combined with biological and molecular knowledge.
“We hope that the project will demonstrate that scientific and clinical evidence can quickly and directly be translated into improvements in patient safety and therefore health benefits. It will also enable us to compare how different people respond to a variety of drugs throughout Europe.”
ALERT will use a variety of text mining, epidemiological and other computational techniques to analyse the EHRs to detect ‘signals’ – combinations of drugs and suspected adverse events that warrant further investigation.
The ALERT project began on 1 February 2008 with a planned duration of 42 months. Hippisley-Cox hopes it will lead to suppliers building real-time alert systems into EHRs.
“The research will mean that we should be able to discriminate between true signals that point to an ADR and spurious signals. This can help to reduce uncertainty among both patients and physicians, ultimately saving lives and increasing the quality of day-to-day life for many patients.”
“The ALERT project aims to develop the first Europe-wide computerised system to detect ADRs better and faster than the current spontaneous reporting systems. Although we are not sharing data, we are sharing technology to look at drug safety and identify possible problems in real-time. This is the one of the biggest EU collaborations of this kind and I am sure it will produce positive results for future healthcare.”
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