Professionals from the Hematology Department of the Hospital 12 de Octubre have published in Blood Cancer Journal their analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on multiple myeloma (MM) patients, concluding that they have had a higher risk of infection and mortality than non-oncology patients.
The study presents a local and global picture of the impact of the pandemic on MM patients and is based on large datasets from electronic medical records. Specifically, the analysis has been cross-referenced with data from more than 9 million patients in Europe and 82 million patients in the US, which are available through TriNetX.
TriNetX is one of the world’s leading clinical data platforms for research, sourcing from more than 150 healthcare organizations in 30 countries. Users of the platform can define patient cohorts of interest and formulate sophisticated research questions about entire populations; comparing outcomes, treatment pathways, disease burden, incidence, prevalence… a wide variety of actionable information, at their service.
At the origin of this platform is the work of the Biomedical Informatics Group (GIB) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, with a long history in the integration and standardization of medical data. To understand its participation in the TriNetX platform, one must go back to the role of GIB-UPM in the European EURECA project (Enabling information re-Use by linking clinical REsearch and Care), whose seek to achieve semantic interoperability between different electronic record systems. As a partner in the project, GIB-UPM focused on data modeling and terminology integration with clinical information systems.
During this project it collaborated with Custodix, a company specialized in data protection for eHealth solutions, with whom it later partnered to collaborate with InSite, a Patient Centered Clinical Intelligence platform capable of offering applications for hospital use powered by medical records data from all over Europe.
Following the acquisition of InSite by TriNetX, this platform renewed its confidence in GIB-UPM for data integration, standardization and quality tasks, now on data from all over the world, not just Europe. Currently, GIB-UPM has 8 researchers and 2 professors linked to this leading network in the secondary use of clinical data for research. This allows researchers from hospitals in Spain to carry out research work such as the one mentioned above on MM and COVID.
