Make data usable
Become a data partner and make your data securely available to enable life-saving research.
For researchers and data custodians
At the Eastern England SDE we work with NHS and research organisations that hold and manage health data that could be used for research, innovation and direct patient care. Recognising that high-quality data resources exist across in the region, the SDE offers a secure, flexible environment to make your data work harder for life-saving research.
Are you a researcher?
The SDE provides a trusted platform for you to access and analyse your existing academic or clinical trial datasets in a secure space.
Do you work for an NHS organisation?
Make your patient data useable via the SDE and support life-saving research. Read our FAQs to find out more about the process.
Why make health data available via the Eastern England SDE?
There are several benefits for using the SDE:
Support impactful research and patient care
Health data is vital for research and innovation but most NHS data is unused for these purposes. The health data that your organisation holds and manages could be securely discovered, accessed and analysed within the Eastern England SDE by approved researchers for R&D that could include epidemiological studies, clinical trials recruitment, real world studies, health systems research and translational research.
Increase data privacy and security
The Eastern England SDE is the most secure way to make your data accessible for research. Hosted and run by the NHS, data is accessed on a federated basis and is not stored in a data lake. The SDE is fully compliant with NHS data governance and UK data protection regulations.
Have more control over your data
The Eastern England SDE will help you keep track of data access requests and who is using and analysing your data assets. Data is only accessed when needed (following rigorous approvals) and never leaves the NHS.
Streamline data access requests
Use the SDE to co-ordinate and manage data access requests in one place.
Unlock new partnerships and funding
As the single point of access to the region’s health data the Eastern England SDE will provide new opportunities for research partnerships and funding.
- Contracting and information governance: A data centre agreement and a data sharing agreement are established to set out the basis for data processing and to describe the legal roles and responsibilities of the organisations involved.
- NHS IT and information governance approvals: A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) will be developed to ensure all NHS IT/network approvals for firewall changes etc. are in place to support the installation.
- Node establishment: Deployment of software (node) connecting NHS systems to the Eastern England SDE and the Health Data Research Gateway.
- Node connection to synthetic data: Validation of data harmonisation using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM) using synthetic datasets. The use of synthetic data will support testing and training on the node ahead of connecting live data.
- Live data: Secure ingestion of de-identified data that has had the National Data Opt-Out (NDOO) applied.
- Productive operations: Transition to live production state with repeatable, compliant data flows.
How we work with our NHS data partners
We have developed a structured onboarding process for new NHS organisations who wish to make their data available via the SDE. In addition to supporting you throughout the process, we also provide funding for NHS organisations to cover the installation and for the provision of data.
Join the region’s leading health and research organisations
Organisations in the region who we are working in partnership with to make data available include the following:
“Our Trust is using the Eastern England SDE as a secure analytics platform. For the first time it gives us a secure space in which we can use data science tools and collaborate with trusted researchers and collaborators without needing to move, share or copy data. This is supporting our research while keeping patient data safe.”
Make your data save lives.
Interested in joining us as a data partner? Contact us to get started.