Appendix A: Consultation Questions¶
This document outlines the position on the characteristics required for TREs to support safe and ethical research using health data assets from data custodians within the Alliance. Set out below are the questions used to seek input to guide the development of this approach, to understand the level of support and to identify particular concerns.
- Safe people: How do we accredit researchers in a way that can support academia, NHS and industry (large and small, UK-based and beyond) to achieve the vision that every health and care interaction and research endeavour will be enhanced by access to large scale data and advanced analytics? What can we learn from the ONS Approved Researcher Scheme and other similar approaches?1
- Safe setting: How do we ensure that a move to including TREs based on hybrid/public cloud ensures that data remains safe and cannot be accessed by the hosting technology companies? How is this best explained to data custodians, researchers and the public and not just security experts?
- Safe outputs: How do we achieve a scalable and trustworthy approach to safe outputs? Should Safe Return be considered a separate 'safe' and represent a TRE + model?
- User centred functionality: What is the minimum set of analytical tools and functionality that a TRE must make available for researchers?
- Accreditation: What approaches should be considered to assess that TREs meet the characteristics required? Who should be the accrediting authority -- and how should this be funded?
- Public trust: How can we engage patients and the public to demonstrate the benefits of health data research and build public trust around the use of trusted research environments for research and innovation at scale?'