Discovery

Core Functionality

Discovery is a Weave for cohort discovery against OMOP CDM databases. This Weave process two main types of queries:

• Availability: Answers the question “how many patients meet certain criteria?” without revealing individual-level data.
• Distribution: Returns de-identified aggregate statistics (e.g. age, sex, diagnosis counts) for a cohort of interest.

These queries are designed to protect privacy through configurable obfuscation techniques such as rounding and low-count suppression.

Weave Identity

Use in Federated Research

Discovery is built to support federated research networks where each site runs its own software locally.

This model allows institutions to collaborate on large-scale health research without sharing raw patient-level data, maintaining data sovereignty and privacy.

Reference Implementation

Bunny is open-source, lightweight, and security-conscious, enabling scalable health research without compromising data control at the institutional level. Bunny is an application developed by the University of Nottingham that enables privacy-preserving cohort discovery across federated health data networks. It is designed to work with OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) databases and is deployed at partner institutions as a secure, read-only query agent.