Health Data Research UK is uniting the UK’s health data to make discoveries that improve people’s lives.

As the national institute for health data science, we are bringing together the sharpest scientific minds and providing safe and secure access to rich health data to better understand diseases and discover new ways to prevent, treat and cure them.

This ‘One Institute’ strategy sets out our vision for the next 20 years – for large scale data and advanced analytics to benefit every patient interaction, clinical trial, biomedical discovery and enhance public health – our five year ambitions and plans for 2019/20.  

It focuses on key areas of science, people and infrastructure, all underpinned by our commitment to earning public trust through engagement and involvement in the use of health data for research.

The document outlines the way in which great science will be achieved through developing advanced techniques to analyse complex and diverse health data and seize its power to solve health challenges. By bringing together the areas of maths, statistics, computer science and interdisciplinary teams we will develop analytical methods and tools to shape the future of healthcare.

Our talent and training work aims to create a Health Data Research UK Alumnus Network of more than 10,000 health data scientists spanning all career stages, from school-leaver to senior research manager and international opinion leaders. Through programmes including masters degrees, doctoral training and fellowships, we will support both educational and career pathways in order to create leaders within health data research, to influence the science and infrastructure of tomorrow.

With the competition for Digital Innovation Hubs opening on 7 May 2019, our commitment to great infrastructure is already underway. With an ambition to create world-leading Hubs for scientific research and digital innovation by developing a cutting-edge infrastructure and a UK approach to secure research data services, we will eliminate the restrictions to responsible health data access. Our design and dialogue phase of the Digital Innovation Hubs has already engaged 1700 individuals across industry, academia, NHS and other organisations and our 10 Sprint Exemplar projects are already underway alongside our ongoing work bringing together the UK Health Data Research Alliance in further exciting work taking place within Health Data Research UK today.

We recognise that we will only achieve our ambitions by involving patients and the public consistently during the development and delivery of our strategy.  Therefore public engagement is a priority for Health Data Research UK and we will encourage more effective health data science by involving people at all stages of the innovation process. Our Public Advisory Board is one element of this wider engagement strategy and, since its formation in January this year, its members have been crucial in providing advice and input to our various programmes.

This strategy document has been developed with assistance and input from our research sites, our non-executive Board, funders and Public Advisory Board. We would like to thank those involved for their comments and contributions.

It is written for the HDR UK community and will be used to align local and regional priorities whilst also setting out our commitment to create a single national institute for health data science.

To read the document in full – click here