The Gateway

About

The Health Data Research Gateway (the Gateway) is an online platform designed to make the entire researcher journey – from finding datasets to analysing data and sharing outputs – smoother and more efficient. This means researchers and data scientists can spend more time answering important questions that drive improvements to people’s health.

The Gateway is funded by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and is being used by NHS England’s Data for Research and Development Programme to provide a ‘single front door’ for research access to the NHS Research Secure Data Environment Network.

- A clean, intuitive user interface with easy navigation, tool tips, and a dedicated support area for data custodians.
- Elastic integration for smarter search capabilities across all Gateway entities, from datasets to data uses.
- Curation options for users and data custodians to create collections of Gateway resources around the particular theme, disease, or organisation.
- Europe PubMed Central integration to enhance discovery of linked resources on the Gateway.
- Multi-query options available to users through a simplified data access request process with an automated email relay with the data custodian for easy communication
- A data use register to allow data custodians to publicly show how their datasets are being used, by whom, and for what purpose.
- Faster metadata onboarding with automated integrations and support for more data types including biosamples and imaging data.
- Query federated datasets through the cohort discovery tool to find out how many records match specific criteria relevant to a research project.

The Gateway does not hold or store any health or patient data itself, nor does it approve users to access sensitive data for research. A dataset on the Gateway is summary information, or metadata (data about data), about a particular dataset, not the data itself. Metadata published on the Gateway can be administrative, descriptive, structural, and technical. This information helps users decide whether the data itself would be useful for their research project and whether they would be eligible to access the dataset.

Built for the future

The Gateway is an enterprise-level solution designed to support collaboration and open-development at scale. It is built on Google Cloud and uses cutting-edge, open-source frameworks (such as Next.js and Laravel), along with OpenAPI standards to ensure the scalability, maintainability and interoperability of the platform, now and in the future. Industry-standard tools such as Elasticsearch power the Gateway’s trainable search functionality, and BC Platforms supports delivery of Cohort Discovery.

HDR UK introduced a major new version of the Gateway in late 2024 with significant enhancements designed to empower the research community and accelerate scientific discovery for public benefit. Find out more about this update, here.

Strengthening the ecosystem

Our vision for the Gateway is that it becomes the go-to place for discovering, exploring and accessing health and health-related data, software, research analysis, publications, diseases, phenotypes and other shareable resources – evolving into a platform co-created by the community that builds upon existing technological solutions.

Visit the Gateway

- Improve automation processes to streamline the curation of assets and content
- Provide the underpinning platform to match the emerging requirements of the latest data science such as improving the search functionality
- Ensure our open-source code is modular, scalable and maintainable so it can be easily and rapidly improved by both the HDR UK technology team and the wider community
- Leverage existing and open-source tools and promote re-use