About the Georgetown University Health AIM-AHEAD Data Bridge (AADB):

Significant advances in health data science and analytics, along with increased availability of health data, are expanding the possibilities for health data research. Machine learning, real-world evidence studies, and big data analytics can uncover new insights from health data and promises improved health decision-making and outcomes for patients and populations. In support of the AIM-AHEAD mission and the research community,  our team collects, stores, transmits, and synthesizes individual health data, medical condition information, and treatment records to perform innovative health research, implement global health initiatives, and facilitate data sharing between public health agencies. We strongly believe that Health data research can help identify risk factors for diseases, assess the safety and efficacy of treatments, study health disparities, guide public health policy decisions, improve quality of care, and more. 

The Data Bridge initiative aims to curate and make available aggregated, de-identified data sets to support research investigators, educators and students. These data sets will be appropriately anonymized to protect individual privacy while retaining the necessary variables, structure and quality to enable impactful analysis. We will disseminate these data resources through a regulated request process and provide guidance to recipients on ethical data usage. Our goal is to promote data-driven research and education by facilitating access to rich repositories of health data in a responsible, transparent manner.

Current list of available data sets and resources:

• Synthetic Data: Artificially generated data that mimics real healthcare data created algorithmically by learning patterns from real datasets and then generating new simulated data exhibiting those same patterns and relationships. 

• Social Determinants of Health (SDoH)- open SDoH datasets enable critical research and support equitable public health policy decisions. We curated and standardized a large set of public data sets that include the social and environmental conditions that impact health outcomes and are readily available to correlate with your data sets for analysis and development of prediction models. 

• Workshops and education materials: We designed and developed a set of core competencies and SDOH resources available to the AIM-AHEAD community for training, research and development.  The workshops offer introductory content as well as deep exploration of key topics as part of SDOH data including facilitated, expert stakeholder engagement. The workshops will also highlight solutions to advance health equity. 

• Request data: Responsible use of health data for research requires navigating important ethical, regulatory, and technological considerations around its appropriate collection and application. It is our responsibility to adhere to AIM-AHEAD's and NIH's guidelines on ethics and confidentiality  (https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research-trials-you/guiding-principles-ethical-research)