Standardising and Deploying Sensitive Data Research Passports

Safe research, health data, electronic health records, data ecosystem, federated data, trusted research environments, FAIR data, underpinning infrastructure, software as infrastructure, data linkage,

Researchers need access to sensitive data for research and innovation; however, data custodians have a legal responsibility to ensure this is done in a way that protects the confidentiality of data subjects. SDR-Passport will enhance and standardise data custodians’ capability to assess one of the 5 Safes principles: “safe people”, streamlining processes and information governance across data custodians to accelerate the assessment of safety of researchers, making it more efficient, reproducible, scalable and robust. SDR-Passport will implement international data passport standards, to create a UK-wide service which all data custodians can utilise to query information on researchers to assess their safety. We will work with existing data governance groups to understand and standardise the information which needs to be captured about researchers. SDR-Passport will enable this standard and service to be scaled across the whole network of data custodians and typically cloud-based Trusted Research Environments (TREs) across the UK, streamlining data access and minimising a significant bottleneck currently experienced by researchers attempting to use sensitive data.