Keynote Monday

Prof. Dipak Kalra
President, The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data

Title
Raising the impact of real world evidence

Abstract
In an environment in which most regulatory and authoritative health strategy decisions are made on the basis of randomised control trials, real-world evidence (RWE), primarily derived from electronic health records, remains a second-class citizen. Real world evidence is widely taken to include Pragmatic clinical trials and insights derived from the distributed analysis of large volumes of routinely collected health data and registry data (so called big data). This presentation will look at the growing scale and reputation of big health data, the ways in which good governance principles and better quality data are creating reusable data at scale, how platforms and tools are enabling better quality evidence generation, and the perspectives of different stakeholders towards the positioning of RWE in decision making: by regulators, health technology assessment agencies, outcomes benchmarking and value based care. This talk will review how we are presently able to generate trustworthy real world evidence, what we mean by that, and the barriers that remain to trusting it. These remaining barriers will need to be tackled by future health informatics research.

Biography
Prof. Dipak is President of The European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD). He plays a leading international role in research and development of Electronic Health Records, including the development of ISO standards on EHR interoperability, personal health records, EHR requirements. He has contributed to several EHR security and confidentiality standards. Prof. Dipak has led multiple Horizon 2020 and IMI projects in these areas, alongside pharma companies, hospitals and ICT companies. He recently co-led a €16m project on the re-use of EHR information for clinical research, EHR4CR, alongside ten global pharma. He is a partner in another IMI project, EMIF, on the federating multiple population health and cohort studies. Prof. Dipak also led an EU Network of Excellence on semantic interoperability and is a partner in other EU projects on the sustainability of interoperability assets, the transatlantic sharing of patient summaries and quality labelling. Prof. Dipak is Professor of Health Informatics at University College London and Visiting Professor of Health Informatics at the University of Gent.