A new collaboration will give more researchers access to the largest and oldest cardiovascular database in the world. The DCRI and analytics leader SAS will provide researchers worldwide with data management and analytics tools to explore 45 years of cardiovascular patient data collected by the Duke University Health System.
The DCRI and SAS share the goal of greater transparency and openness in research to improve patient care to find new ways to treat heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. For the DCRI, the collaboration represents a significant milestone for its broader data access initiative, Supporting Open Access for Researchers (SOAR).
“Open science is good for researchers, good for innovation, and good for patients and the public,” said Eric Peterson, MD, MPH, DCRI Executive Director and professor of medicine (Cardiology). “The question at the center of the open-science discussion is not whether data should be shared, but how we can usher in responsible methods for doing so. Our collaboration with SAS will allow data to be shared for the advancement of public health worldwide.”
The cardiovascular data set is part of the Duke Databank for Cardiovascular Disease (DDCD). The databank includes de-identified records for patients treated at Duke between 1969 and 2013, and data from more than 100,000 procedures on more than 50,000 unique patients. The data includes patient demographics, cardiac medical history, other conditions occurring simultaneously (comorbidity), final impressions and subsequent treatments. This information is used to test clinical hypotheses, develop clinical trial protocols and help researchers assess long-term outcomes and assess time trends.