Working with our international partners, HDR UK seeks to develop and pilot trustworthy approaches to data use across country borders. This is critical for enabling international research collaboration that requires large scale data from diverse populations to address major health challenges, such as understanding the causes of rare diseases to develop new treatments and enabling clinical trials.

HDR UK’s work in this area focuses on areas such as:

  • Enabling researchers to discover health data sets for tailored international studies through searching summary information on data catalogues in different countries. This federated search approach is being piloted by HDR UK and Australia Research Data Commons, and it supports researchers in the UK and Australia to discover relevant health datasets across both countries through their respective national data catalogues.
  • Connecting secure data infrastructures internationally to ensure data stays locally, while enabling researchers to apply for access and conduct analysis. This federated analytics approach requires the linking of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) in different countries and is being piloted under HDR UK’s Federated Analytics programme. UK partners are working with the Ministry of Health, GovTech and A*STAR in Singapore to enable safe, secure international research collaborations to tackle shared health challenges, such as cancer and diabetes. This is part of wider activities under HDR UK’s Memorandum of Understanding with the National Research Foundation, Singapore.
  • Addressing the complexities of international data transfer law to enable research collaboration across multiple countries. Based on projects commissioned by the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, HDR UK has worked with UK partners seeking to provide international access to data sets relating to brain health. The resulting article sets out data governance and technical approaches that can help enable legally compliant and trustworthy approaches for international data access.
  • Working with our partners to enable adoption of international products and standards, such as the adoption of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health’s Data Use Ontology (DUO) product on the Health Data Research Gateway. This provides a common international ontology for describing data usage limitations and rights, making it easier for researchers to discover appropriate datasets for their research studies.