Big and disparate data: considerations for pediatric consortia

Area of Science:

• Pediatric epidemiology
• Big data in health research
• Children's health consortia

Background:

• Growing need to analyze large, diverse datasets for pediatric disease and disability.
• Children's health research consortia are crucial sources of big data.
• Understanding challenges and opportunities in pediatric big data research is essential.

Purpose of the Study:

• Review existing children's health consortia.
• Highlight pooled analyses from these consortia.
• Provide recommendations to advance collective pediatric research efforts.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing children's health research consortia.
• Analysis of recent pooled analyses from consortia.
• Identification of common challenges in pooled analyses.

Main Results:

• Formal consortia facilitate data sharing from multiple epidemiological studies.
• Collective efforts can achieve more than individual research groups.
• Practical challenges hinder investigator participation in consortia.

Conclusions:

• Accessing consortia data centers enables research beyond initial hypotheses.
• Consortia can facilitate previously infeasible or costly research.
• Addressing participation challenges is vital for consortium success.