Purpose of the post
The Data-Enabled Clinical Trials thematic area is making it easier for researchers and clinicians to safely and securely access and use electronic health records (EHRs) within their clinical trial, which supports the running of time and cost-efficient trials. One of the key challenges identified by clinical trial teams is how to define commonly used cardiovascular outcomes (phenotypes) within EHRs and how to provide and share these definitions. The Data-Enabled Clinical Trials thematic area is working collaboratively with the Defining Disease team to address this challenge, creating the SCORE-CVD (Standardising Clinical Outcome measures in Routinely-collected Electronic healthcare systems data) project. SCORE-CVD will help to identify and create phenotyping algorithms (computable instructions that use the information contained within EHRs to define a specific clinical event/disease or characteristic) for priority cardiovascular trial outcomes.
The Defining Disease thematic area and SCORE-CVD project also aim to define community-agreed best practices for how phenotyping algorithms using EHR data should be derived, stored and shared, ensuring they adhere to the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.
The post-holder will play a key role in supporting the Data-Enabled Clinical Trials and Defining Disease thematic areas through the development of new phenotyping algorithms to derive outcome measures commonly used in cardiovascular clinical trials, adhering to best practices. This will involve working closely with cross-functional teams, pulling in expertise from experienced clinical cardiologists, clinical trialists and health data scientists and internally with the BHF Data Science Centre’s Health Data Science team, Research Project Managers and relevant Associate Directors. The post-holder will be required to perform analyses of linked EHR data for quality control purposes and to help better understand the utility of the data.
Additionally, the post-holder will have the opportunity to contribute to the broader work of the Health Data Science team, in particular the development and application of reproducible and reusable data curation pipelines to support projects using linked EHR data within the national secure data and trusted research environments to answer a wide variety of research questions.
This post presents an exciting career development opportunity, ideal for a health data/computer scientist with experience in data wrangling and curation of health data for research. Experience of phenotyping algorithm development and methods for validation would be beneficial. This role would suit a candidate who seek to expand their skills in supporting data-driven clinical trials and broader health data science projects with valuable networking opportunities within the field.
Main responsibilities
- Work with the research and clinical communities to develop phenotyping algorithms that meet their needs, with a focus on clinical trials, under the supervision of the Senior Health Data Scientists.
- Identify, assess and apply appropriate existing and new phenotype definitions and algorithms to nationally collated linked health data.
- Carry out technical validation checks on linked data sources (e.g., duplicates, linkage errors) and develop functions to check these data rigorously for errors and inconsistencies.
- Support the Research Project Manager in the development of new and existing collaborations within cross-functional teams including clinical staff, experienced clinical trialists and analysts.
- Curate and share phenotyping algorithms following the BHF Data Science Centre’s Publication and Dissemination Policy and provide support for researchers supported by the Centre to do the same.
- Summarise and disseminate findings and learnings to inform research and contribute to discussions of where routinely collected data can be used in research studies, or the need for further guidance (e.g., comparing trial-specific data collection with routinely collected health data).
- Prepare and present results in oral and written reports and publications.
- Be an active participant and attend the regular Centre and project meetings, reporting on progress and presenting results.
- Be committed to open source, transparent, and reproducible research as the post will involve releasing tools, algorithms and approaches under an open-source licence.
- There may be opportunities to contribute to data curation pipeline development under the supervision of the Senior Health Data Scientists. This includes: understanding data quality and utility, writing and curating support documentation for linked data resources (e.g. data dictionaries, variable mapping tables, data access process documentation, Git repositories).
Experience
- Good first degree and higher degree/equivalent experience in one of the following subjects: bioinformatics, biostatistics, computer science, mathematics, statistics, data science, informatics, epidemiology.
- Data manipulation and analysis skills, including:
- Scripting skills and experience in writing code in at least one programming language, in particular SQL, Python/PySpark
- Experience of coding in at least one statistical software package (e.g. R, Stata).
- Relevant experience working with or ability to rapidly learn about health-related longitudinal data, deriving variables from electronic health records and preparing analysis-ready datasets.
- Understanding of or ability to rapidly learn about information governance, privacy, and security issues with using NHS health records.
- Understanding of or ability to rapidly learn about sources of routinely collected health data and their application to different types of research studies
- Writing, presenting, and explaining technical and/ or scientific reports to a wide range of scientific and lay audiences.
- Ability and track record of working independently and co-operatively as part of a team
Skills
- Ability to work accurately, with attention-to-detail
- Ability to and experience of working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate effectively and confidently with people at all levels
- Ability to clearly communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience
- Excellent report writing and presentation skills
- Excellent organisational and time management skills, with the ability to work independently as well as manage competing priorities and issues under time pressures
- Committed to open source, reproducible, research
- Experience of working in a fast-paced and evolving environment.
Please note, as we are a UK-based organisation, applicants must be living in, and eligible to work in, the UK. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.
We politely request no contact from recruitment agencies or media sales. We do not accept speculative CVs from recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.
