West Midlands Secure Data Environment

A little over a year since its inception, the West Midlands Secure Data Environment (West Midlands SDE) is transforming the way the region’s health data is accessed for research.

Following the West Midlands SDE’s development as part of an NHS England network of 12 secure data environments, accredited and approved professionals will be able to apply to use the platform to inform their work in the fields of research and clinical trials.

The platform will bring together health information from across the six integrated care systems in the West Midlands. This large pool of invaluable data will support innovative advances in care and treatment to reduce health inequalities and benefit the 6.2 million people living in the region. Local people are involved with all key programme developments to ensure they align with the expectations of the population.

Fundamental to the SDE is the level of security it employs. It operates to the highest data protection standards, while an ‘airlock’ system will prevent researchers from taking data out of the environment. Results of their analysis will be checked by the SDE team to ensure individuals’ privacy and confidentiality are maintained.

West Midlands Programme Director and SDE national lead, Hilary Fanning, said: “Secure data environments are designed to bring together NHS professionals, university researchers and industry experts to deliver research and innovation powered by NHS data. These NHS-owned and managed data platforms will provide secure, expedient access to data and improve what’s previously been a time-consuming and costly process.

“The West Midlands SDE will enable us to ensure safe stewardship of data for research that will really make a difference to the lives of people in the region. It will improve the quality of care we provide through innovation based on research, positively impacting our communities.”

In February, the independent Confidentiality Advisory Group, CAG, gave its approval for the SDE to proceed. The Health Research Authority also gave the SDE’s application a positive response through its Research Ethics Committee review process.

Now the programme is seeking further endorsement to provide access for non-research use of health data.

Professor Liz Sapey, Co-chair of the SDE’s information governance and ethics workstream, said: “Bringing together data from across health and social care providers in the West Midlands has the potential to transform the care we provide, and build better treatments through evidence. The West Midlands Secure Data Environment offers game-changing potential to not only work with our local health and care partners to improve people’s health, but also to ensure that patients and the public are at the heart of decisions in how health data is used to benefit society.”

MidTECH representatives are members of the West Midlands SDE’s commercial workstream. MidTECH provides advice and support to NHS organisations across the West Midlands region on matters of contracting (for example, if an NHS organisation has a product it wishes to commercialise) and protection of NHS intellectual property (IP). As a key supporter of NHS innovation, networked to innovation leads in our regional NHS trusts, the West Midlands SDE sees MidTECH as a huge asset to the programme.