The THINKINGroup is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between researchers and clinicians across various specialities, whose overarching aim is to use real world, routinely collected data to produce high quality research on epidemiology, clinical practice and health care utilisation relevant to patients and clinicians.
We aim to:
- excel in developing Automated Clinical Epidemiology Studies (ACES) tools for research
- produce high quality research outputs using our ACES innovations such as DExtER
- enable senior clinicians across specialities to create self-sustainable teams of passionate researchers in health data science
- train the next generation of clinical informaticians by supporting junior doctors and medical students
Our research is conducted using large datasets from primary and secondary care, particularly data from The Health Improvement Network (THIN), a large UK general practice database which contains anonymised longitudinal records for approximately 14 million patients from more than 600 practices (about 6% of the population).
There are a number of satellite THINKINGroups, each with a focus on a particular clinical speciality, including diabetes (DEEP THINKING), cardiovascular disease (THINKING Heart), rheumatology (Joint THINKING), and gastroenterology (Gut THINKING). We also have groups dedicated to promoting and facilitating standardised data collection (THINKING Standards) and developing innovative methodologies for the analysis of routinely collected data (THINKING Methods).