The new hubs will help connect regional health and care data with biomedical data in secure environments. This will pave the way for NHS, academic researchers and industry innovators to harness scientific knowledge and emerging technologies to develop new drugs and devices and improve health services.
Funded through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, the Digital Innovation Hubs will be led by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK), the national institute for data science in health, delivering on behalf of UK Research and Innovation.
Between three and five hubs will be created across the UK over the next three years to enable innovation that will have a long-lasting impact on improving the health of the public. The hubs will provide safe, secure and controlled environments for data and enable NHS clinicians to work together with health researchers, data scientists, computer scientists, ethicists, social scientists and the public.
The UK has some of the richest health data of anywhere in the world. However, these datasets across health, care, genomics and biomedicine are fragmented making it difficult, sometimes impossible, to access and use for research purposes. This causes delays and, in some cases, prevents accredited researchers and industry innovators from analysing data to help deliver better care and improve health for patients, society and for future generations.
The Digital Innovation Hubs will securely and safely connect data across regions of 3-5 million people and create an accessible layer of data from GP practices, hospitals, social and community care providers, alongside genetic and biomedical information and other datasets for research and innovation. Combined with the unique research expertise across UK universities and industry, this initiative offers an unprecedented opportunity to use data to improve the long-term health of the public. It will also create new jobs in the UK’s life sciences economy, drive medical innovation and ensure that NHS patients benefit from new treatments first.
HDR UK will work in partnership to establish the hubs and ensure data is used responsibly and ethically to benefit society. The hubs will follow the strict safeguards underpinning health data security and access as set by UK regulatory bodies and will be transparent in how and why data is used, stored and shared.
Fo more details see the HDRUK website.