ORCHID-E v0.1
Research type
Research Database
IRAS ID
315156
Contact name
Clare Bankhead
Contact email
Research summary
Oxford-Royal College of General Practitioners Clinical Informatics Digital Hub: Epidemiology Research Database
REC name
HSC REC B
REC reference
22/NI/0120
Date of REC Opinion
16 Aug 2022
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion
Data collection arrangements
ORCHID-E (which is short for The Oxford-Royal College of General Practitioners (GPs) Clinical Informatics Digital Hub: Epidemiology Research Database) will be a new research database to support well-designed epidemiological studies, with a focus on primary care.
ORCHID-E will be created from the data collected as part of the Oxford-Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research and Surveillance Centre’s (RSC) disease surveillance and vaccine effectiveness programme (ORCHID), commissioned by the UK Health Security Agency (HSA). The disease surveillance programme has been running since 1967 and monitors 38 infectious diseases, including COVID-19.
ORCHID currently includes computerised medical records data from over 1,900 general practices and more than 18 million patients.
ORCHID receives pseudonymised (de-identified) patient-level coded and numeric clinical data. No text data will be available. These data will be cleaned, structured and linked to secondary care records and mortality data. In the future, it will also include Cancer Registry data. ORCHID data then go through a further layer of de-identification before being uploaded into ORCHID-E. After this point, the data is un-identifiable and no further linkage or reverse identification is possible.
Research programme
Creating ORCHID-E will more easily facilitate high quality research whilst maintaining the appropriate level of governance and confidentiality required. Only research approved by the Primary Care Hosted Research Datasets Independent Scientific Committee (PrimDISC) will be allowed within ORCHID-E. The goal is to maximise the use of ORCHID-E data by researchers to address a wider range of clinical and epidemiological questions, with the ultimate aim of improving prevention, diagnosis, management and outcomes for patients and to inform policy and practice for health care providers.
Research database title
Oxford-Royal College of General Practitioners Clinical Informatics Digital Hub: Epidemiology Research Database
Establishment organisation
Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences
Establishment organisation address
University of Oxford
Radcliffe Observatory Quarter
Woodstock Road, Oxford
OX2 6GG