VAREANZ programme

Since 2002, our research team have been creating large-scale cohorts in primary and secondary care settings as a basis for developing vascular risk prediction equations and for quality improvement initiatives. The research has been largely funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand, the Heart Foundation of New Zealand, the New Zealand Ministry of Health and the Healthier Lives National Science Challenge.

Since 2011, we have received consecutive 5-year Health Research Council programme grants to undertake a series of studies linking these large-scale cohorts to national health administrative datasets. The 2011 VIEW (Vascular Informatics using Epidemiology and the Web) programme was followed by the 2016 VIEW2020 programme and the VAREANZ programme began in 2022. These research programmes recognise that a number of widely available treatments could significantly reduce the risk of incident and recurrent vascular disease, but because of possible under-and over-treatment, there are inequities related to age, gender, ethnicity and deprivation that are frequently difficult to recognise because few valid vascular risk-predictions algorithms are available and datasets describing the vascular risk profiles and management of all adult New Zealanders have not been created.

The VIEW programmes (2011-2021) aimed to:

• develop new risk prediction algorithms to assist clinicians estimate vascular risk in multiple high-risk populations;
• determine in whom, where and why, under- and over-treatment and inequities in vascular risk and risk management occur;
• develop and implement a multi-algorithm risk prediction engine and a ‘big-data’ vascular health information platform to support initiatives to increase appropriate treatment, reduce inequities in vascular disease outcomes and improve overall vascular health.

The aims of the current VAREANZ programme (2022-2026) are to:

• create a unified updatable national vascular-metabolic risk collection including almost every adult New Zealander – the VAREANZ Collection, to characterise everyone’s cardio-vascular-metabolic risk profile;
• create national sub-collections for metabolic-related conditions and for heart failure and atrial fibrillation;
• establish a Māori-led, equity-focussed big-health-data sovereignty governance group to provide oversight of every aspect of the research;
• establish a big-health-data science expert group to provide oversight of the VAREANZ collections data ecosystem to create it, manage it, curate it, keep it secure, and make it accessible; and
• predict cardio-vascular-metabolic risks of everyone in the VAREANZ collections, identify cardio-vascular-metabolic risk-equity-gaps, inform stakeholders, and monitor progress towards closing the gaps.