EAVE: Scotland's population health data platform
A team co-led by the University of Edinburgh and Public Health Scotland has created one of the most comprehensive national-scale health data resources in the world, providing crucial information to help guide the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and internationally.
The EAVE II team was the first in the world to show that the rollout of first dose COVID-19 vaccines provided substantial protection (>90%) against COVID-19 hospital admissions. This led to international confidence in their effectiveness. The study also influenced international health policies in several countries to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to older people, by demonstrating that the vaccine was equally effective regardless of age.
EAVE is a population health data platform that brings together linked GP, vaccination, testing, viral sequencing, hospitalisation, prescribing, and mortality data into a near real-time national longitudinal cohort. It covers 5.4M people, approximately 99% of the Scottish population, and was developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This platform has allowed the EAVE II team to, in near real-time, provide crucial answers to urgent health policy, public health and clinical questions related to:
- epidemiology and forecasting of the pandemic;
- risk stratification to identify those at highest risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes;
- uptake, effectiveness and safety of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics; and
- investigation of healthcare disruption and recovery.
The scale of data also enabled the EAVE II team to investigate rare adverse events, including contributing to the body of evidence that lead to the blood disorder ITP being added as a rare adverse event to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine’s product information.
EAVE II later detected the occurrence of vaccine waning, thereby accelerating the introduction of booster vaccine doses. A planned national lockdown after Christmas 2021 was averted after the study reported that the Omicron variant led to less severe disease despite being more transmissible than the earlier Delta variant.
More recently, EAVE II helped guide the prioritisation of the autumn 2022 booster roll-out by identifying those at increased risk of COVID-19 hospitalisation and death: older people, people with multimorbidity and those with underlying health issues.
Thanks for the extraordinary work you have been doing. You have provided brilliant insights that have guided not just the UK but the world.
These results among others were requested by and presented to key government and health organisations, including the Scottish Government’s Chief Medical Officer and COVID-19 Advisory Group, the Joint Commission on Vaccination and Immunisation, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the World Health Organization.
Our ability to get back to as close to normal as possible is undoubtedly because the vaccine is saving lives and helping those who get infected to be less affected. Studies by the University of Edinburgh show us that the likelihood of serious illness and death is reduced by 90 per cent for those who are vaccinated compared with the unvaccinated population.
The EAVE II team are now extending the utility of the EAVE platform beyond the pandemic to investigate other respiratory conditions such as asthma, COPD, RSV and influenza. They also have ambitions to expand EAVE’s composition to include data on environmental and economic factors, to answer more complex questions on health.
As part of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry in 2023, Sir Patrick Vallance praised Scottish healthcare data - and specifically work from the EAVE II team
The National | Sir Patrick Vallance praises brilliant Scottish healthcare data