TELEPORT: Connecting researchers to big data at light speed

Health and administrative data about people resident in the UK are generated by the NHS, government and other organisations and subsequently held in different locations across the UK's four nations according to devolved legislation and governance. Trusted Research Environments (TREs) were developed by organisations in academia, NHS, government agencies, and, in some cases, commercial companies to safely store this data and control access to it for research purposes. De-identified data is typically available for research via these TREs. However, each houses specific data based at different institutions, which adds difficulty to a researcher's task of trying to gather a full picture of scientific outputs for the entire nation due to the replication needed to analyse all available data across the country.

 A solution to improving data access and efficiency for researchers is federated data access, enabling parallel access to data housed in multiple physically separated environments (without data moving from their host environments, instead being accessible from its host location to a researcher in a single safe, secure environment) where researchers can see the data required for their research projects. 

Teleport is starting the transformation of traditional TRE access to data, partnering with the custodians of national-level data in Wales and Scotland (SAIL Databank and Scottish National Safe Haven) and the technology providers of the TRE platforms (the Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP) at Swansea University and EPCC at the University of Edinburgh). By making data accessible by connecting TREs, researchers could, for example, have better-facilitated access to understand rare diseases at scale and generally increase the quality of research in common conditions by increasing the sample size accessible in a single environment, rather than having to run multiple disparate analyses. It is the starting place for efficient study across the UK, promoting the move away from duplicated research in siloed environments, instead enabling better scientific outputs and health outcomes due to the increase in scale, granularity, and connectivity of data available. Both sites in scope for Teleport have national-level data holdings of complementary scale and research infrastructure of equivalent maturity to deploy, test, and develop the proposed access solution. 

This work was funded by UK Research & Innovation [Grant Number MC_PC_23009] as part of Phase 1 of the DARE UK (Data and Analytics Research Environments UK) programme, delivered in partnership with Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK).