The purpose of the Alleviate Pain Data Hub is to transform UK pain data to be more accessible for researchers in future projects.
Chronic pain, which is pain that has been present for more than 3 months, is one of the largest medical health problems and can impact massively on the lives of those affected. Many research groups across the UK have gathered relevant pain-related data. Alleviate is the hub for these datasets, providing a common solution for standardising and searching the datasets and with national data collected within the NHS.
Data from a wide range of data sources (research studies from across the UK and routinely collected NHS data) have huge potential to unravel the secrets of chronic pain. However, using data from different sources has challenges.
- We need to introduce standards, even when data have already been collected.
- We need to know that data mean the same thing, even if they have been collected in different ways. Datasets are large and complex.
- We need to automate our data handling, and organise data in a way that will work in the long-term.
- We are providing ways to access the data so that their use can fully achieve its enormous potential.
- We need to ensure that data provided by people with chronic pain work for everyone.
Alleviate is working to deliver world class health data and services for pain research in partnership with Universities, people with lived experience of pain and the Advanced Pain Discovery Platform (APDP). Our shared aim is to enable new and efficient, large-scale research that makes life better for everyone who lives with pain.
The Alleviate project combines expertise from leaders in pain research, people living with pain and the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) team. HIC is based at the University of Dundee and the team have over 20 years’ experience working with large complex data sets made up of different types of data. We also work with members of the Digital Research Service (DRS) and use the Five Safes Framework to ensure a secure approach to the use of that data. The Alleviate pain datasets can be found at the Health Data Gateway.
More information can be found here.