The MIREDA Partnership is a UK-wide collaboration that harmonises electronic birth cohorts into a common data model to enable federated, reproducible life-course research across nations and Trusted Research Environments (TREs).
The partnership brings together major maternal and child health datasets from England, Wales, and Scotland, transforming them into the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) to support consistent, cross-cohort analyses while data remain securely within their host environments.
Together, the harmonised cohorts represent over 18 million births, enabling research into rare exposures, policy impacts, and long-term health outcomes across the life course.
Visit our:
- Preprint Data Resource Profile.
- Protocol paper
- Continuously updated, detailed protocol - Not yet available
MIREDA is funded by the UK Medical Research Council and brings together five major electronic birth cohorts:
- Born in Wales
- Born in Scotland
- Born in Bradford
- Born in South London (eLIXIR)
- Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) birth cohorts
Each cohort remains within its own secure TRE, but harmonisation into OMOP enables:
- Federated analysis without sharing raw data
- Reproducible analytical pipelines
- Cross-nation and international comparisons
- Large-scale studies of rare exposures and outcomes
This GitHub organisation provides open technical resources developed by the MIREDA partnership, including:
- Scripts used to run the tools MIREDA employed in their ETL processes.
- Scripts which may have been needed for pre- or post-processing in order to circumvent any limitations in the methods/tools used.
- Contains a subdirectory for each birth cohort in MIREDA.
- Each subdirectory contains JSON and CSV files which outline the mapping rules used by each cohort for their OMOP transformation.
- A place for our MIREDA analysts to share any useful or common analysis scripts that process the MIREDA OMOP CDM data.
- Additional useful documents that outline complex or multi-faceted approaches, troubleshooting and resolutions, etc.
- Other repositories within the MIREDA organisation reflect other projects we are involved with using the MIREDA data resource.
- These are also outlined in the Projects section above.
The metadata for the harmonised MIREDA datasets are summarised the Health Data Research UK Gateway:
https://healthdatagateway.org/en/collection/119
Data are not held centrally. Each cohort:
- Remains within its own Trusted Research Environment
- Is governed by local data controllers
- Requires separate access approval
Federated analysis enables the same code to run across all sites without moving sensitive data.
Work is currently underway to pilot a federated platform held within the SAIL Databank.
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Explore repositories for:
- Mapping specifications
- ETL pipelines
- Analytical examples
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Review documentation for:
- OMOP structure in birth cohorts
- Mother–infant linkage methods
- Harmonisation decisions
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Contact us to apply to work with our data and discuss ideas at mireda@jiscmail.ac.uk.
If you use MIREDA resources, please cite:
Seaborne et al.
UK electronic birth cohort data harmonisation using a common data model
(Final publication details to be added once available.)
Funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC)
Partnership Grant: MR/X02055X/1
MIREDA Partnership
Centre for Population Health
Swansea University Medical School
Project pages:
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FX02055X%2F1
https://centreforpopulationhealth.org/projects/mireda/
Unless otherwise stated, code in this organisation is released under an open-source licence.
See individual repositories for licence details.
