Hub Mission

The Health Data Sciences Hub (HDSH) was established by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics and the Department of Biomedical Engineering in collaboration with TAD - The AI and Data Science Center as a knowledge center for Medical data, including Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Genetics, Genomics, Imaging, and more. The collective data is a key resource for TAU researchers.

Medical data carry great potential to better understand diseases, their causes, and ultimately to improve treatment, healthcare, and wellness. A plethora of new initiatives worldwide collect, organize, process, and analyze health-related data for sizable cohorts, and much more will be available in the coming years.  Many of these efforts also collect and link multiple layers of information, providing a multi-faceted view of human health and disease.

In Israel, medical data setting is particularly advanced. EMR data date back 20+ years and are distributed across a relatively few large HMOs and hospitals. This leads to great potential for rapid utilization of Israeli healthcare data.

The vast volume and complexity of the data, security and licensing requirements, regulatory needs, and the heterogeneity of databases, however, render their utilization challenging for most individual researchers. In addition, most data of HMOs and hospitals in Israel, with a few exceptions, are not easily accessible to academic researchers.

We aim to reduce barriers for access, usage, processing, management, and orientation in key EMR databases by acquiring and preserving know‐how on the content, structure, and manipulation of such databases, and provide this expertise to researchers.

Goals:

• Maintain deep familiarity with the highly complex data and licensing requirements of key medical databases.

• Keep up-to-date with emerging new medical database resources and data updates in existing resources.

• Enable easy integration of data from multiple data sources into the same study.

• Facilitate the development of new medical data science collaborations with Israeli hospitals and HMOs to make their data available to TAU researchers.