AHeaD

In the past five years, we belonged to three different teams (“Pharmacoepidemiology – Pharmacoepi”; “Injuries – IETO”; “Informatics in Health – ERIAS”). The collaborations we developed ultimately concentrated most of our teams research efforts, typically around the secondary use of electronic databases for the study of health and medicines in a real-world setting,

Anticipating the research challenges that will emerge from the multiplication, diversification, and complexification of digital health data, we decided to join forces into the AHeaD team project.

This will combine our originating teams expertise in electronic health records databases (HERs), hospital datawarehouses, ontologies, data visualization, knowledge representation, and machine learning and natural language processing for health research, thus constituting a tremendous research opportunity.

Indeed, if the questions and needs for health assessment in real-world settings will remain, how to answer these questions will likely change dramatically. In the coming years, the use of electronic health databases, that developed tremendously over the past 30 years, will need to be complemented using information from other sources that will help strengthen and substantiate the real-world evidence provided. Building bridges between applied health research, already widely using EHRs, and informatics consequently appears as a requirement when envisioning the future development of health-assessment in real-world settings.

The research will divide into three axes corresponding to different objectives and methods:

• Data & Signals: Structuring and bridging data for hypothesis-generating in real-world assessment.
  Safety signal or repurposing hypotheses are mostly presented or generated from the results obtain from one datasource/type of information analysis. We Intent to go further by developing approaches that will combine various type/sources of Information for hypothesis-generating research from real-world data.
• Use & Effectiveness: Stay focus, remain global.
  Medicines & health determinants assessment is better performed when closely focusing on one medicines or care. The detriment is to lose sight of the overall care environment (therapeutic alternatives; healthcare trajectories). We intent to develop research that will deeper contextualize and characterize the overall healthcare use surrounding targeted research regarding the use or effectiveness of a given medicines or care.
• Policies & Impact: Assessing the public health impact of regulatory actions.
  Ultimately, the hypotheses generated/confirmed within the two first research axes can result in official recommendations or regulatory actions aiming to optimize healthcare strategies. Our research will here assess to which extent these are successfully adopted and benefic to health, thereby completing our research path from hypothesis-generation to translation to society.