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.

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.