Quality checks, curation and methodological enhancement of the UK LLC Partner Studies using linked data

The UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC) has been set up to bring together data from longitudinal population study (LPS) volunteers with their health records. This will allow data managers from studies to check how good the health information they get from their volunteers is. For example, they can look at COVID-19 health records to understand which participants had the disease and how bad it was, and compare it to what people have reported themselves. They will also be able to create new data. For example, they can look into health records of people who have heart disease to understand what type of heart disease it is. Then they can put their participants’ data into more specific categories to see if having a certain type causes you to have worse COVID-19 symptoms. All of this adds value to the study data and cannot be done without access to the health records. Better data means better research, which can lead to improvement in health and wellbeing throughout and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.