The Health Data Research Innovation Gateway (the ‘Gateway’) provides a common entry point to discover and enquire about access to UK health datasets for research and innovation. It provides detailed information about the datasets, which are held by members of the UK Health Data Research Alliance, such as a description, size of the population, and the legal basis for access.
The Gateway includes the ability to search for research projects, publications and health data tools, such as those related to COVID-19. New interactive features provide a community forum for researchers to collaborate and connect and the ability to add research projects.
The Innovation Gateway does not hold or store any datasets or patient or health data but rather acts as a portal to allow discovery of datasets and to request access to them for health research. A dataset is a collection of related individual pieces of data but in the case of health data, identifiable information (e.g. name or NHS number) is removed and data is de-identified where possible. When you access the Gateway you will not be able to view or extract the data itself. Instead, you will be able to see information that describes what the different datasets are (e.g. where the dataset has come from, a description of the dataset, the time period and the geographical areas the dataset covers).