Ed Burn

My research is focused on using routinely collected health care data to inform medical decision making. With careful curation and analysis, the data from millions of routinely recorded health care interactions can be used to generate evidence on patient prognosis and the safety, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of medicines and procedures.

The foundation of my current research is the use of a common data model to transform disparate sources of health care data into a standard format. This then allows for data analyses to be performed across a distributed network of data partners, with only analytic code and aggregated results sets shared between sites. This approach has already facilitated a number of network studies, ranging from a comparison of alternative approaches to knee replacement in the UK and US to an early description of the people being hospitalised with COVID-19 in the US, South Korea, and Spain.

I have been contributing to the European Health Data & Evidence Network (EHDEN) project and am an active member of the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) network. More recently, I have been leading analyses for projects funded by the European Medicines Agency to assess outcomes among patients with COVID-19 and to evaluate the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.