[3-A-5-01] The UK’s progress towards enabling secure, researcher access to sensitive health data at a UK population scale
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are collected at the point of healthcare provision by the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) National Health Service. These routinely collected datasets are extremely valuable for research and innovation projects. Examples include epidemiological studies, training Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, and finding suitable patients for recruitment to clinical trials. However, as these datasets contain sensitive data and are unconsented for research purposes, special care must be taken to securely manage and access them in a way that protects patient confidentiality. Within the UK, Trusted Research Environments (TREs) (also known as Safe Havens) are becoming the default standard for access of such data for research. These follow the 5 Safes principles of Safe Data, Safe People, Safe Projects, Safe Outputs and Safe Settings. This talk will describe the UK landscape and the work of the Health Data Research (HDR) UK as a national institute to accelerate finding and accessing data across TREs, so that it becomes routine for research to take place on data from the 68 Million people within the UK.