East of England Secure Data Environment

The East of England Secure Data Environment (SDE) is now operational and undergoing beta testing. We will be able to support health and care research using de-identified NHS patient data in early 2025 but are open to project requests now, including 'bring your own data' projects needing a secure workspace with data science tooling and computational support.

The SDE is designed to make it easier to undertake health data research that aims to improve outcomes in:

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

The information below provides a summary of the services we can provide to researchers. Contact us if you have a specific service need not explicitly identified below - we will be delighted to discuss how we can best support you.

A secure workspace standard package, including a cloud-based Linux virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) providing access to an instance of the platform, a suite of included tools, and support capabilities, will be implemented for each project.

Technical summary

A secure Linux (AWS) VDI.

Standard 16GB RAM 4v CPUs - configurable per workspace and session, giving flexible storage and compute options to suit your needs.

Only pay for what you use.

Included tools

JupyterLab development environment | Python & R | LibreOffice, Excel | Airlock - for data or code egress | MySQL

Optional tools

(May incur additional service charges)

Examples include:

• 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)
• Secure workspace decommissioning and removal
• Computing power increase/decrease: flexible compute power to suit your needs configurable for each workspace and session

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

• data access 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

Following launch, we will be able to provide curated datasets from participating health and care providers in secondary care settings across the East of England.  We are aiming to achieve a harmonised data model (OMOP Common Data Model) across participating secondary care providers by summer 2025 to support data and cohort discovery.

Classes of data available from January 2025 include:

• demographics
• secondary care - events, diagnostic and procedure coding, lab results and prescribing

In addition to curated datasets, we will also offer:

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

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

To find out more about East of England SDE:

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