Research
BHF renews investment in pioneering cardiovascular data science centre
We have renewed our funding for the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre to enable it to continue its vital work over the next five years. The £10 million investment will enable the Centre to build on its successes in harnessing health data to improve the understanding, prevention, and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
The BHF Data Science Centre at Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) was established in 2020 and has become recognised as a national hub for cardiovascular data research.
The Centre works with researchers, clinicians, patients, and data custodians across the UK, and supports groundbreaking projects that use large-scale health data. The Centre’s aim is to unlock new insights from the data and inform public health policy to transform the lives of people with cardiovascular conditions.
Accelerating analysis
Over the past five years, the Centre has cut the time it takes accredited scientists to access data for approved projects, accelerating both the analysis and the findings.
A group of public contributors has also been created to help steer the Centre’s work and make sure it meets the needs of people affected by cardiovascular conditions.
The new funding will see the Centre continue to improve heart and cardiovascular health through the power of large-scale data and advanced analytics. The focus for the next five years will be on:
- efficiency – faster and easier trustworthy data use for all cardiovascular researchers
- quality – enabling better cardiovascular research with better data.
Richer insights into heart health
The Centre is also exploring how to integrate different types of data, like medical imaging and regional NHS data, that provide greater detail and depth to generate richer insights into heart health.
Patients and the public will remain at the heart of this work. The Centre wants to embed lived experience from diverse voices into the full research cycle, from design to dissemination, enabling patients and the public to influence how health data is accessed, analysed, and translated into real-world impact.
'Extraordinary potential'
Professor James Leiper, our Director of Research, said: “We are delighted to continue supporting the BHF Data Science Centre’s vital mission to further explore the extraordinary potential of cutting edge data science to tackle cardiovascular disease, which remains a leading cause of death in the UK.
“The Centre’s impact in enabling data-led research to flourish has delivered many impactful outcomes to date. At BHF we look forward to the seeing the Centre achieve its aims of facilitating more efficient access to high quality research-ready data to allow researchers to deliver benefits for patients.”