The Gateway

About

The Health Data Research Gateway (the Gateway) is an online platform providing researchers with a simplified journey to search, discover and request access to health and health-related data and associated sharable resources. 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.

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.

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2024 update

HDR UK recently introduced a major new version of the Gateway with significant enhancements designed to empower the research community and accelerate scientific discovery for public benefit.

The Gateway was first launched in 2020 and aimed to make health data more discoverable to researchers so they can spend more time addressing important research questions. The 2024 update goes even further, advancing beyond data discovery to make the entire researcher journey – from finding datasets to analysing data and sharing outputs – smoother and more efficient.

The latest Gateway release brings a suite of enhancements to improve user experience, search functionality, resource discovery, and metadata management:
- Redesigned interface: A cleaner, more intuitive layout with easy navigation, tool tips, and a dedicated support area for data custodians
- Smarter search: Elastic integration for faster, more accurate results, expanded search term options, refined filters, and options to download results or dataset libraries
- Enhanced resource discovery: Search all online life sciences and biomedical research publications with Europe PubMed Central integration and associate them with datasets and other resources published on the Gateway
- Simplified data access: Multiple enquiry options available to users with an automated email relay with the data custodian for easy communication
- Faster metadata onboarding: Automated integrations, support for more data types including biosamples and imaging data, and an improved onboarding form with new fields for easier management
Learn more about the 2024 Gateway update here.

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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 – a platform co-created by the community that builds upon existing technological solutions. The new version of the Gateway provides much better value to the community and strengthens the wider technology ecosystem through increased collaboration with other organisations and groups developing similar solutions.

- 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