Alongside our Scottish Safe Haven Network partners, DataLoch is playing a key role in a suite of 10 data-driver projects receiving investment from the Health Data Research Service (HDRS). Together, these projects will improve the opportunities for research dependent on Scotland- and UK-wide health data.
Today’s data challenge
Health data in the UK holds immense value for research, including advancing our understanding of different diseases and conditions, what causes them, their impacts, and which treatments are most effective.
Nationally reported datasets consist of top-level data reported to central health data organisations, such as Public Health Scotland’s National Data Catalogue, and can help with population-level or public health research.
At a regional level, there are more-detailed datasets that support delivery of local services. These data can offer greater insights for more-specific research questions that seek to improve patient care and outcomes. By developing close and trusted relationships with their local health boards, organisations operating regional TREs – like DataLoch – have been able to make extracts of health data available to researchers, alongside an in-depth understanding of the data (e.g. which codes are used preferentially by local clinicians, why lots of people seem to have a birthday on 1st January, the possible reasons why a section of data is missing, etc). This approach has enabled hundreds of research projects into a diversity of conditions, treatments, and outcomes.
Currently, there is increasing demand for de-identified health data that combines the detail of regional data with the scale of national-level data. This demand is being driven by public health researchers and national policymakers, as well as researchers interested in treatment efficacy or understanding how social inequalities influence patient outcomes. Combining the benefits of regional and national data will lead to increased opportunities for projects that will improve services and patient care.
Addressing the challenge
In 2025, the UK Government announced funding to establish a new service to standardise and safely streamline the processes of accessing health data for research and clinical trials.
Subsequently, HDRS has prioritised engagement with regional TRE operators to understand how they can make the processes simpler for researchers. Their engagement has led to two calls, the first – Technical Transformation Projects – has led to investment for 43 six-month projects that will pave the way for technologies, governance, and procedures to be standardised across the UK.
Scottish Safe Haven Network collaboration
Working alongside our Scottish Safe Haven Network (SSHN) partners, each project has a focus on Scottish data with a view to supporting future adoption by TRE operators throughout the UK:
STAR-Lab: developing a robust de-identification process so that pathology and microbiology reports can be made safely available for research projects.
SCALA: building on recent collaborations to develop a standardised national laboratory test-results dataset available on-demand to researchers on a sustainable basis.
TETHER: developing automated tooling to mitigate the challenges in linking specialised data across different regions and streamline the process of extracting data for specific projects.
1DQ: addressing the data-quality challenges of GP data, such as differences in coding practices in different GP practices, data loss when patients move practice, and issues caused by GP practice changes and migrations from one data system to another.
SPARK: using a GP engagement model developed by DataLoch as a foundation for developing scalable approaches that will make GP data available for research through two further Safe Havens.
UNIFY: developing a prototype digital enquiry route and triage service to improve the researcher experience from the first step of seeking access to data.
SCAMPI: delivering a single medical-imaging processing and management platform to enable access to imaging data more quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably.
ANCHOR: aligning the information governance processes across the Scottish Safe Haven Network to standardise project-application steps for researchers.
HARMONY: establishing the foundation for UK-wide imaging research involving the collaborative development and validation of AI tools using more representative data.
BEACON: improving the coverage and quality of metadata descriptions of regional datasets, ensuring researchers have a more consistent experience when exploring datasets.
Overall, the portfolio of 43 projects provides a critical starting point in bringing the depth of detail found in regional datasets to a national scale, while also addressing the practical challenges experienced by researchers in accessing data held in different parts of the UK. We are proud to play our part.
Investing in the foundations of HDRS
The Scottish Safe Haven Network
The SSHN is a collaboration between the organisations behind Scotland’s secure data infrastructure. Led by Research Data Scotland (RDS), the Network seeks to continually improve Scotland’s data research landscape. This includes standardising the way data is held and improving data access systems in line with the Scottish Government’s strategy for health and social care.
RDS news item on HDRS investment
Image: Public Domain Pictures on Pixabay
