Phase 1 Development

Phase 1 of Gateway development began on 5 July 2019, with the launch of the procurement process for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The MVP will be live and complete by 10 January 2020.

Read the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway Privacy Policy

Read the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway Terms and Conditions

What is the Gateway Phase 1 MVP?

The Gateway MVP will provide a portal for health researchers and innovators to find out about relevant datasets, and request access to them from the data custodians. The Gateway will contain metadata, i.e. information describing what the datasets are, and will not directly host any patient and health data itself, including Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Data custodians from the Health Data Research Alliance will continue to hold the data, and the Gateway will not change any existing rules around data access for health research and innovation.

Read more about the Gateway

The MVP is composed of three main parts:

  • IBM will develop the Gateway Portal – MVP, using Design Thinking approaches to bring user requirements into the design and development of the front-end user experience. The Portal will allow researchers and innovators to search for and identify relevant datasets.
    Download the Gateway Portal MVP specification
  • NHS Digital and The University of Oxford will develop the Metadata Catalogue, which will provide the underlying functionality to support the Gateway portal, and which will be developed through a separate process. This will be a web-hosted backend application providing all the functionality to manage the metadata for the datasets discoverable through the portal. The supplier for the Metadata Catalogue will be announced soon.
    Download the Metadata Catalogue specification
  • Parity and Metadatworks are undertaking the metadata onboarding and process improvement, to support the inclusion of metadata from across the Health Data Research Alliance into the Gateway. The supplier for the Metadata onboarding and process improvement will be announced soon.
    Download the Metadata Onboarding specification

Click here to watch a recording of the Gateway Phase 1 launch webinar.

What other organisations are involved in delivering the Gateway MVP?

In addition to the organisations listed above who are leading the delivery of the MVP, other organisations involved include:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) – AWS is providing the underlying cloud infrastructure.
  • JISC – JISC will provide researchers and innovators using the portal with a single sign-on solution, so they can use their own institutional login with the Gateway.

No patient data is hosted by the organisations delivering the Gateway Phase 1 MVP.

Phase 2 Development

Procurement for the second phase, which will be developed with the support of a technology partnership, was launched on 16 October 2019.
Click here for more information on Phase 2