National analytics platform speeds up research, protects data

It has been used in some 70 projects since it was implemented in November 2022

- Yap Wei Qiang

A local study made the surprising finding that, compared with pregnant women with gestational diabetes, those without gestational diabetes actually incurred higher hospital expenses in the last three months of their pregnancy.

The latter spent more than an average of $1,300 on hospitalisation in the later stages of their pregnancies, possibly for conditions that were not detected earlier.

The research team from A*Star analysed its own study data of the mother-child pairs, as well as data it obtained from national databases through a national analytics platform - the Trusted Research and Real World-Data Utilisation and Sharing Tech (TRUST) platform.

This platform, which ensured the data was anonymised and protected before it was made available to the team, has been used by researchers in some 70 projects since it was implemented in November 2022.

It allows local researchers to draw on anonymised data within a formal governance framework to more quickly conduct studies, rather than repeating the traditional process of recruiting new participants to collect and analyse new data.

The A*Star research team postulated that women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), which develops during pregnancy and may resolve after delivery, typically received closer health monitoring, resulting in other health risks being detected and managed earlier.

On the contrary, mothers who did not have GDM and received standard antenatal screening may develop complications in the later stages of pregnancy, such as hypertension or delivery issues, which may require hospital care.

To validate this hypothesis, the A*Star team is now tapping the TRUST platform again to analyse more data from the National Electronic Health Record system. This new phase of the study is still ongoing.