A Co-operative Clinical E-Science Framework (CLEF): joining up healthcare and clinical research

Abstract

The CLEF project aims to establish a secure socio-technical framework that enables sharing patient data for the purposes of research whilst maintaining patient privacy and confidentiality. The value of shared data is increased by integrating, within a secure repository, both existing structured information (lab reports etc) with information extracted from texts (clinic letters), and using clinical inferencing and filtering techniques to derive a canonical view of the record called the ‘chronicle’. Statistical disclosure control and Language generation technologies are used to simplify and control access to this complex resource