Welcome to ARCHIMEDES,  – the Advanced Research Collaboration for Health Integration, MEDical Exploration, and data Synthesis.  

ARCHIMEDES is a digital health platform that Ingests, manages, and/or releases Data Sets for research purposes including: biostatistical analyses, predictive modelling, data visualization and artificial intelligence.

The ARCHIMEDES Data Governance Framework describes the tools and practices that enable the responsible contribution and dissemination of health data through ARCHIMEDES.

The ARCHIMEDES Leadership Committee, Joint Liaison Committee, Community Partners Committee, and Data Access Committee (DAC) perform decision-making and advisory functions.

The Data Access Compliance Office (DACO) is the administrative arm of the DAC and provides support by reviewing Data Contribution Forms and Data Access Requests before they are sent to the DAC for approval.

ARCHIMEDES is a joint scientific initiative led by the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, the University of Ottawa, and McGill University.

ARCHIMEDES is designed to collect and ingest diverse multimodal health data, including clinical, behavioural, imaging, genomic, biomarker, biobank, digital health, wearable, and administrative datasets.

The ARCHIMEDES Ethics and Data Governance Framework outlines the tools and practices that enable the responsible contribution and dissemination of health data through ARCHIMEDES. The full framework, as well as a summary, is available on the website. 

If you are looking to use data hosted on ARCHIMEDES, there are two tiers for access: open access and controlled access. Member access will be implemented in the next phase. 

The first access tier is open access data are made openly available to anyone through ARCHIMEDES on a public website. ARCHIMEDES allows for de-identified data and pre-clinical data through Open Access. 

The second access tier is controlled access where data are only available to approved researchers for specific research projects. Researchers must apply for access and agree to follow privacy, ethics, and data use requirements before using the data.  

There are 3 types of data that can be contributed on ARCHIMEDES: 

1. Coded data: Data must have (i) an ethics approval and informed consent that authorize sharing, (ii) an ethics waiver of informed consent requirement, or (iii) another legal authorization. All direct identifiers (e.g., names, social insurance numbers) must be removed and replaced with a unique code prior to contribution.  

2. The second type of data that can be contributed is de-identified data. This requires that all direct identifiers and most indirect identifiers be removed or transformed to reduce the risk of re-identification to a very low level, in accordance with recognized standards and applicable legal and ethical requirements. 

3. The third type of data that can be contributed to ARCHIMEDES is pre-clinical data. This type of data can be shared if it does not and never did constitute data relating to human research participants, or identifiable personal data, according to applicable research ethics requirements and data protection laws. 

ARCHIMEDES is designed to support many types of research, data, and workflows. ARCHIMEDES supports different study designs, data types, and levels of collaboration, allowing researchers to use only the tools they need while maintaining appropriate controls for privacy, consent, and compliance.

If you are interested in learning more, please visit ARCHIMEDES data .ca or contact us at [email protected].