Eastern England Secure Data Environment

The Eastern England SDE was formed on 1 February 2026 through the merger of the East Midlands SDE and the East of England SDE. Covering an expanded geographical area with a population of just under 12 million people across distinct rural, coastal, and urban environments, the Eastern England SDE provides secure, de-identified patient data and a range of services to support high-quality research in the public interest, accelerating discoveries that improve outcomes for patients and the public.

Hosted by Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust, the Eastern England SDE maintains strong partnerships with over 30 NHS trusts, 13 universities and academic institutions, and a genomics centre, extending across the 11 integrated care systems (ICS) of: 

• Bedfordshire, Luton, and Milton Keynes
• Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
• Derby and Derbyshire
• Herefordshire and West Essex
• Leicester, Leicestershire, and Rutland
• Lincolnshire
• Mid and South Essex
• Norfolk and Waveney
• Northamptonshire
• Nottingham and Nottinghamshire
• Suffolk and North East Essex 

The Eastern England SDE will support health data research that improves outcomes in: 

• prevention of illness 
• prediction of risks and outcomes 
• personalisation of treatment 

The information below provides a summary of the services available to researchers. If you have a specific service need not explicitly listed, please contact us - we will be delighted to discuss how we can best support your work. 

We can provide curated published datasets in:

• secondary care – events, diagnostic and procedure coding, lab results and prescribing
• prescribing
• diagnostics
• mortality
• demographics

In addition to curated datasets, we also offer: 

• a refresh/update of a published dataset
• a synthetic dataset

A full list of available datasets is published on the HDR UK Health Data Gateway.

A secure workspace standard package will be implemented for each project. The package includes a cloud-based, secure VDI providing access to an instance of the platform, a suite of included tools, and support capabilities.

Technical summary

Secure Linux (AWS) VDIs  

Compute starting from 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM - allowing range of options configurable per workspace including GPU to suit your needs.  

Full control of compute - for example:

• select appropriate compute or storage for specific work loads
• turn instances on/off
• pay for what you need, when you need it, minimising costs and environmental impact

Included tools

Code development - Git, JupyterLab, Python, R, RStudio

Database - PostgreSQL, DBeaver

Productivity - LibreOffice

Data movement - airlock for controlled movement of data or code in or out of the environment

Optional tools

(May incur additional service charges)

DBeaver (cross-platform SQL database editor and IDE) Git import capability 

‘Bring Your Own Tool’: users can request access to their own tool(s) to use for analysis purposes within the secure workspace (subject to technical and security review) 

‘Bring your own code’: users can request access to their own code to be used within the secure workspace (subject to technical and security review via git airlock) 

Secure workspace decommissions and removal 

Stata software - additional charge 

Limited Windows support for specific applications

We offer a range of consultancy services to support research projects. These include:

• project application support 
• feasibility assessment – including but not limited to data provenance summaries (origin, mode of collection, original purpose, for example) 
• project management 
• contracting and legal support  

When a project is approved to use our data, we publish information about that project in our data use register.

The register gives a summary of the project to show how your data will be used.

To find out more about Eastern England SDE:

• email the team at [email protected]
• visit the Eastern England SDE website