Atlas for Health

The recent COVID-19 pandemic offered insights and lessons around the health needs of the population. In particular, it revealed significant gaps in our understanding of people’s health and how different diseases affect the risk of severe COVID-19 and related complications.

For example, it highlighted that researchers often study diseases one at a time, and diseases which are considered rare are usually studied separately from those considered common. This makes it hard to see the bigger picture.

First, it misses out on the experience of people (patients) who commonly have multiple diseases and may take multiple medications; and second, this approach is not systematic, meaning many diseases and populations are neglected in pandemic research.

Atlas for Health was created to address these challenges.

The Atlas is delivered by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, clinicians, and data scientists, working in partnership with the NHS and the communities we serve. The team gathered and analysed health and publicly available data, including relevant scientific literature, ongoing clinical trials, clinical guidelines and genetic research, on thousands of diseases to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the state of the nation’s health.

Learn more about the Atlas on UCL’s Institute of Health Informatics research page

How data is analysed

The health data analysed in this programme has all direct identifiers such as names and NHS numbers removed before researchers access the data. The data is only accessible within NHS England’s Secure Data Environment and by approved researchers working on approved, COVID-19 related research projects.

The research is enabled through the CVD-COVID-UK/COVID-IMPACT consortium. A summary for project CCU013_02 is listed on the BHF Data Science Centre site and on the Health Data Research Gateway.

Explore our other Infrastructure Programmes