George Tilston, a University of Manchester Biomedical Research Centre data manager, received a special recognition at this year’s HDR UK Conference, for those making significant contributions to research that often go unacknowledged.

We spoke to him about his role and the contribution that technical staff make to advancing healthcare and innovation.

What’s your background?

I’ve always been interested in numbers and computers. When I came to Manchester I did a business management for information technology degree where I focused on the data and data analysis side.

I then got an internship at the Centre of Health Informatics at the university, and then I became a data manager. I’ve been involved in data management and data engineering ever since, and have done some data analysis as well.

Tell us about your current role

I mostly work with the Greater Manchester Care Record, which is our main data resource for primary care and secondary care linked health data. So, I transform the raw data from a messy format into something that’s research-ready.

What’s the process?

Researchers come to us with quite detailed initial proposals and we liaise with the principal investigator to let them know what is, or isn’t, available and help them understand what they can and can’t do.

We then help them draft their full proposal for access to the data. Once that’s approved we start working on the data for the study team. We clean it up and provide them with a data extract, ready for them to analyse in a secure environment.

So you facilitate swift and efficient research?

We are very much the intermediary between the researcher and the database. A lot of researchers won’t have the knowledge of the raw health data. We can help them progress much quicker than they might do otherwise.

It also means the researchers don’t need engineering skills. They are presented with the dataset, ready to use, with all of the clinical code set work done by us. They won’t have to worry about making code sets for the conditions they’re interested in.

Tell us about some projects you have been involved in

Being a data engineer for the Greater Manchester Care Record (GMCR) leads to lots of proposals getting accepted and papers being published. I’ve been named on several manuscripts which used GMCR data.

One paper found there was a decrease in reported self-harm during COVID, which was perhaps to be expected. But then, after COVID, the levels never returned to where they were before. There was potentially a gap, with people self-harming but it not being reported to primary care. It’s important to know that there are potentially people who need help but aren’t being treated.

Another study found that patients with severe mental illness had worse outcomes from COVID-19 – an important finding, from one of the first papers in that area.

A couple of years ago I was first author on a paper where we had been testing the effectiveness of a metadata catalogue. We asked participants to imagine they were doing a study, and use the catalogue to judge if sufficient data was available to answer their research questions.

It was really useful. The catalogue worked well in some cases but researchers found that data was not always well-represented. For example, electronic health records were collected for direct care rather than research, and they have a complex structure which can be difficult to capture with metadata.

I have also helped Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) contribute COVID-19 hospital admission data to a national data sharing scheme for research; the National Institute for Health Research Health Informatics Collaborative (NIHR HIC), which was something they hadn’t really done before.

Have you developed any particular areas of expertise?

I’ve built up knowledge and experience on the data engineering of primary care health data. I’m also currently helping MFT to adopt the OMOP data standard as part of the NIHR HIC.

Did you have a particular interest in health and health data?

It was something I was always attracted to – the idea of a career that was contributing to something positive. I know that I’m working for a good cause. I really like that.

Should there be more of a spotlight on technical careers?

They can often go unrecognised, especially within academia where there’s a lot of focus on being first author on papers.

Much of our work takes place in the background. So people like me prepare the data, and then the researcher does all the exciting analysis that gets published.

But the names of data engineers are increasingly included in papers and that’s really valuable, as are awards like this HDR UK one. They increase publicity for these roles which might help attract more people to do them.

What about the future?

I’d like to move a bit more into analysis, as well as data engineering. I’ve done a bit in the past, and I could see my role as having both of those skill sets. I think that the engineering experience would complement the data analysis, and vice versa.

 

The Technician Commitment

Find out more about how we are supporting the careers of technologists in health data science, by visiting our page on the Technician Commitment.