Enhancing Data Integration, Interoperability, and Reuse to Address Complex and Emerging Environmental Health Problems

Abstract

Environmental health sciences (EHS) span many diverse disciplines. Within the EHS community, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Superfund Research Program (SRP) funds multidisciplinary research aimed to address pressing and complex issues on how people are exposed to hazardous substances and their related health consequences with the goal of identifying strategies to reduce exposures and protect human health. While disentangling the interrelationships that contribute to environmental exposures and their effects on human health over the course of life remains difficult, advances in data science and data sharing offer a path forward to explore data across disciplines to reveal new insights. Multidisciplinary SRP-funded teams are well-positioned to examine how to best integrate EHS data across diverse research domains to address multifaceted environmental health problems. As such, SRP supported collaborative research projects designed to foster and enhance the interoperability and reuse of diverse and complex data streams. This perspective synthesizes those experiences as a landscape view of the challenges identified while working to increase the FAIR-ness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) of EHS data and opportunities to address them.

New implementation of data standards for AI research in precision oncology. Experience from EuCanImage

“…Despite progress in adopting interoperability standards, data from different sources still contain discrepancies. To make data fully reusable and reproducible, methods for data cleaning, harmonisation, and standardisation must be transparent 38 .…”

Realizing the Potential of Social Determinants Data: A Scoping Review of Approaches for Screening, Linkage, Extraction, Analysis and Interventions

“…Despite some progress, barriers like screening variability [250], data silos [251], predictive model opacity [252], and program adoption challenges [246] restrict reliable, equitable SDoH data usage. Presently, expertise resides in siloes—screening, linkage, extraction, analyses, programs.…”

Adapting to Climate Change: Leveraging Systems-Focused Multidisciplinary Research to Promote Resilience

“…Because these projects generate a wealth of data, SRP has embraced a culture of data sharing to enable multidisciplinary, systems-focused centers to better identify innovative solutions to difficult environmental health problems while accelerating the pace of research in new areas [ 29 , 40 , 41 ]. For example, as teams across SRP centers collaborate to combine and integrate their diverse data, they are able to reveal new scientific connections and a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between exposures and health, from better understanding population-specific sources of exposure to contaminants [ 42 ] to predicting how people may be exposed to contaminants during flood events [ 43 , 44 ].…”

“…These activities are also in line with the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative and Strategic Framework, a coordinated effort by NIEHS and other NIH Institutes and Centers to support research, training, and capacity building activities that address the climate change and health crisis on a global scale [ 35 ] and Executive Orders [ 45 ]. SRP’s systems-focused multidisciplinary centers (see Figure 1 ) can serve as a model for how best to integrate diverse research surrounding a common, complex problem such as climate change to better understand the larger picture and identify solutions [ 29 , 40 , 41 ]. Much of the existing research, tools, and infrastructure developed by SRP grantees, such as new sampling and analytical techniques and advanced methods, can be adapted and scaled up to address climate change issues in different contexts to protect public health.…”