Data challenges for international health emergencies: lessons learned from ten international COVID-19 driver projects

Sally Boylan, Health Data Research UK, London, UK. Electronic address: sally.boylan@hdruk.ac.uk.
Catherine Arsenault, Department of Global Health, Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA.
Marcos Barreto, Center for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health, Gonçalo Moniz Institute, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Salvador, Brazil.
Fernando A. Bozza, Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Disease, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Adalton Fonseca, Center for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health, Gonçalo Moniz Institute, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Salvador, Brazil.
Eoghan Forde, Aridhia Informatics, Glasgow, UK.
Lauren Hookham, St George's, University of London, London, UK.
Georgina S. Humphreys, Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Maria Yury Ichihara, Center for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health, Gonçalo Moniz Institute, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Salvador, Brazil.
Kirsty Le Doare, St George's, University of London, London, UK; Makerere University John's Hopkins University Research Collaboration, Kampala, Uganda.
Xiao Fan Liu, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China.
Edel McNamara, Health Data Research UK, London, UK.
Jean Claude Mugunga, Partners in Health, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Division of Global Health Equity, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
Juliane F. Oliveira, Center for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health, Gonçalo Moniz Institute, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Salvador, Brazil; Department of Mathematics, Centre of Mathematics of the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
Joseph Ouma, Makerere University John's Hopkins University Research Collaboration, Kampala, Uganda.
Neil Postlethwaite, Health Data Research UK, London, UK.
Matthew Retford, Health Data Research UK, London, UK.
Luis Felipe Reyes, Nuffield School of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Universidad de La Sabana, Chia, Colombia.
Andrew D. Morris, Health Data Research UK, London, UK.
Anne Wozencraft, Health Data Research UK, London, UK.

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

5-1-2024

Journal

The Lancet. Digital health

Volume

6

Issue

5

DOI

10.1016/S2589-7500(24)00028-1

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of international data sharing and access to improve health outcomes for all. The International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) programme enabled 12 exemplar or driver projects to use existing health-related data to address major research questions relating to the pandemic, and developed data science approaches that helped each research team to overcome challenges, accelerate the data research cycle, and produce rapid insights and outputs. These approaches also sought to address inequity in data access and use, test approaches to ethical health data use, and make summary datasets and outputs accessible to a wider group of researchers. This Health Policy paper focuses on the challenges and lessons learned from ten of the ICODA driver projects, involving researchers from 19 countries and a range of health-related datasets. The ICODA programme reviewed the time taken for each project to complete stages of the health data research cycle and identified common challenges in areas such as data sharing agreements and data curation. Solutions included provision of standard data sharing templates, additional data curation expertise at an early stage, and a trusted research environment that facilitated data sharing across national boundaries and reduced risk. These approaches enabled the driver projects to rapidly produce research outputs, including publications, shared code, dashboards, and innovative resources, which can all be accessed and used by other research teams to address global health challenges.

Department

Global Health

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