Data Expert & Access Partner Working Group

Within the VAC4EU study network, there are 14 different Data Access & Expert Partners (DEAPs). These organisations have access to large, observational healthcare data sources and provide the necessary knowledge to appropriately re-use them for pharmacoepidemiologic purposes.

Data accessed by the DEAPs cover over 180 million individuals across Europe and can be extremely diverse in terms of characteristics of the source population, country of data collection, prompt for data recording, healthcare setting in which the recording took place, underlying healthcare policies and culture, data dictionaries, and data quality. In this context, a deep knowledge of the peculiarities of each local data source is fundamental for the generation of high-quality evidence.

For these reasons, DEAPs play a central role in VAC4EU studies. Their expertise is leveraged to actively assist all steps of the study pipeline, including review of the protocol and statistical analysis plan, script running, review and discussion of results, as well as the approval of the final study report.

The DEAPs WG was established in February of 2023 out of a need to develop recommendation for best practices relevant to the process of the review and approval of study results in VAC4EU. A reference document was produced as the first output of the DEAP WG activity and it is currently being piloted in several VAC4EU studies.

Since then, the DEAP WG has also served as the hub to access DEAPs’ expertise and advice needed to address specific topics. This was the case, for instance, of the collection of DEAP-specific feedback on the identification of cases of thrombotic thrombocytopenic syndrome (TTS), the collection of feedback on VAC4EU archiving processes, and the advice on possible solutions to improve data readiness for timely study execution.

The DEAP WG also proposed and promoted the launching of a task force for developing a framework for estimating tasks’ processing time in VAC4EU studies. The task force was launched in December 2024 under the leadership of the LOC WG. The final output of this is expected to provide great support for resource allocation, budget negotiations, and timeline predictions, not only to DEAPs but potentially to all actors and stakeholders in VAC4EU.

The DEAP WG can be considered a critical hub for integrating DEAP expertise and knowledge into evidence generation and improving the efficiency of VAC4EU study processes.

Taskforces (TF)

• Results Review TF
• Catalogue TF