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INSIGHT is an NHS-led initiative set up to make routinely collected eye data available for approved health research. Our aim is to improve healthcare by making it simpler for researchers to use large, anonymised sets of patient data in a safe and ethical way.

INSIGHT is led by Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, working in partnership with University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. INSIGHT is built around our ‘North Star’ – a guiding principle for delivering benefit to patients and wider society through improving safe, efficient and ethical access to eye health data for research.

INSIGHT’s data offering includes various types of eye imaging and associated patient health records. Using advanced analytics, such as artificial intelligence (AI), INSIGHT allows researchers to develop new insights in disease detection, diagnosis, treatments and personalised healthcare.

INSIGHT utilises AI tools to make existing datasets accessible, bringing scale and efficiency to the collection and curation of anonymised data, and accelerating the benefit to patients.

Together with our partners from the NHS, we are working with researchers from academia, industry and charity sectors, to transform the way diseases are diagnosed, treated and managed in the UK and beyond.

About INSIGHT

  • The INSIGHT Health Data Research Hub is:

    • Ensuring anonymised eye data is available for research intended to benefit patients
    • Focused on eye health but research could lead to breakthroughs in a wide range of conditions, including diabetes and dementia.
    • Committed to putting patients and the public first.
    • Applying the highest standards of ethics, transparency, and safety to its activity.

    The datasets curated by INSIGHT are available through the HDR UK Innovation Gateway.

    Data access applications are reviewed by INSIGHT’s Chief Data Officer, before being passed to our Data Trust Advisory Board (DataTAB). The DataTAB is formed of members of the public, patients, and other stakeholders joining in a private capacity, who bring their own experience to ensure diverse representation of opinions and perspectives. The DataTAB scrutinises individual applications using a set of principles based on the ‘Five Safes’ approach and other public benefit criteria. Applications are accepted or rejected in a transparent manner and successful applicants will be subject to strict licensing agreements that prioritise data security and patient benefit.

    Details of all approved applications are published on INSIGHT’s Data Use Register. The Data Use Register provides an accessible record of how data is being used for research, by who and for what purpose, and offers a demonstration of the value and benefit of using health data.

  • INSIGHT services are aimed at the NHS (trusts, governing bodies and units), university researchers, health research charities, pharmaceutical companies, health technology companies and other public and private bodies that provide services or products to patients in the UK.

    An example of the kind of innovation we expect to lead is a joint Moorfields-Google project that used datasets from Moorfields to develop an AI diagnostic tool for age-related macular degeneration.

  • INSIGHT was created to benefit patients, the NHS and the wider UK public. We are committed to ensuring that the views of patients and the public inform decision-making at every level, and the involvement of our Data Trust Advisory Board (DataTAB) is critical to the data request process. In addition, transparency is one of our core principles: underpinning how INSIGHT works, how decisions are made, and the outcome of requests to access patient data.

    INSIGHT is also committed to maximising value to patients and the public by ensuring that future research findings from all studies conducted using INSIGHT data are published in an appropriate and timely way. More information on the benefit of INSIGHT to patients can be found here.

Further information:

Visit the INSIGHT website

Discover INSIGHT on the Gateway

Follow INSIGHT on Twitter

Contact the INSIGHT team