The Harris Wellbeing/Cochrane research team in Liverpool, led by Professor Zarko Alfirevic, had already secured an NIHR Cochrane Programme grant to investigate the practicalities of onward sharing of IPD from clinical trials. Their 2 year project aimed to host and facilitate onward sharing of a set of clinical trials of progestogens to prevent preterm birth, from the EPPPIC project, led by one of the grant team, Professor Lesley Stewart.
Endorse a data sharing pilot via an NIHR Cochrane programme grant was twofold:
First that patient data would improve uk rcs data Cochrane systematic reviews on priority topics by enabling more in-depth analyses and better answers to an interventions’ impact on subgroups, in particular;
Second, requiring sharing of patient data may raise the bar for future Cochrane systematic reviews and may even help identify fraudulent trials.
In addition to creating a trials data repository at University of Liverpool, with governance systems in place to structure and manage data access, researchers wanted to explore what infrastructure was already available for trials data owners.