Completed Public Health & Healthcare Lungs & Breathing

The 100 million Brazilian linked data and datacentre

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine · Foundation for Scientific and Technological Development in Health Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £1.5M
Period Mar 2017 — Nov 2022

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Brazil will link social welfare records for over 100 million people to their health data—births, deaths, hospitalisations, and infectious disease notifications—creating a single, searchable database. This matters because researchers have never had a population large enough to trace precisely how housing, education, and income affect health outcomes, or to measure the real-world impact of social protection policies. Without such linked data, it is impossible to know, for example, whether a cash-transfer programme reduces hospital admissions for malnutrition, or how eviction patterns correlate with infectious disease outbreaks. If the resource succeeds, it will allow scientists and policymakers to answer questions that are currently unanswerable: which social interventions most effectively improve health, and for whom. The datacentre will be secure and publicly accessible, serving as a training hub and a model for other countries. The project is possible because Brazil already maintains high-quality records and has a legal framework that enables data use for research. International interest is already strong.

View original technical description
The proposed biomedical resource will be built around “CADASTRO-UNICO” a database of electronic records of over 100 million applicants to social protection programmes in Brazil. Records consist of detailed individual information on housing conditions, education and income, organized by household and by individuals. Our proposal is to link the individual social and benefits records to electronic health records including: births, deaths, hospitalizations, infectious disease notification and others. The size of the population will enable research on the interrelationships between social factors and health and on the impact of social protection policies on a large range of health outcomes on a degree of detail never done before. The datacentre will be high-powered, secure and have a public interface. This project is possible because Brazil has high quality records and an open, modern attitude towards use of data for research and policy, supported by a rigorous but enabling legal framework. We will create a unique international resource that will allow researchers and policy-makers to address questions that currently cannot be answered. The resource will serve as a beacon for methodological development and training. Our proposed resource has already attracted substantial interest from national and international scientists and policy makers.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Laura Cunha Rodrigues (EPMC Awardee)Mauricio Barreto (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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A collaboration to establish a paediatric research and outreach centre in northeast Brazil
Minimising inequalities in care access and quality for patients with UTI in Brazil: application of intelligent data linkage and machine learning

Original classification

Biomedical Resources Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.