Akrivia Health Database—deep patient characterisation using a secondary mental healthcare dataset in England and Wales: cohort profile

Abstract

Purpose The Akrivia Health cohort was created to extract data from electronic health records in secondary mental health and dementia care services in England and Wales. The data are anonymised, structured and harmonised from the source electronic health records across a range of information technology systems, enabling for unified, privacy-preserving access for research purposes.Participants The cohort contains data from electronic health records for over 4.6 million patients in England and Wales, as of January 2024. The data are refreshed with regularity, and the dataset expands whenever a new healthcare provider joins the Akrivia network. 13% of the database are patients under 18 years old (n=590 160), 56% are adults 18–65 years old (n=2 631 690) and 31% are older people (n=1 422 609). About 11.5% are deceased (n=538 371).Findings to date Structured data include patient demographics and service pathways. Akrivia Health also uses a bespoke natural language processing model to further extract the research-relevant information from free-text progress notes, including diagnoses, medications and clinical symptoms. This allows for an in-depth longitudinal description of patient journeys.Future plans The anonymised data can be accessed in collaboration with Akrivia Health, following the National Health Service guidelines and without requiring a separate ethics application. There is no planned end date for data collection.