Abstract

Occupation and employment is a major determinant of health and healthy aging. Despite the temporal increase in time spent in employment and profound changes in working life, there is limited coordinated research on occupation and health.

We recently estimated that in Europe alone there is information available on more than 30 million individuals that could be used to study the association between working life and health. However, lack of standardization, inability to code large numbers of job-entries and inabilities to share data have hindered progress. In order to unlock the vault of occupational-health information novel ways of data acquisition, standardization, pooling and analyses have to be developed and implemented. The ability of pooling studies would greatly improve occupational health studies by increasing sample size for robust inference, and would allow risk stratification, identification of new risks, exploration of interactions with work and non-work-related factors and detailed analyses on the shapes of the exposure-response curves.

In recent years we have seen progress in several different methodological aspects. Currently, new tools are available to collect information on work and work exposures. These include amongst others the use of sensors and mobile phone applications. Standardization of occupational information is essential for comparison of results between studies and for pooling of studies. This could be achieved by using common occupational coding schemes, use of automatic coding instruments and common exposure assessment tools. Virtual pooling of data has become possible by using data-shields which instead of bringing the data to the analyses bring the analyses to the data allowing federated analyses.

As part of the OMEGA-NET symposium we will discuss the need for new tools and avenues of how to bring occupational health information together. We will present our inventory of novel tools to aid this process, and will discuss future needs.