Overview of the London SDE

The London Secure Data Environment (SDE) is part of a national research network that will enable secure and more powerful analytics for NHS, academic, and commercial users. Uniquely amongst regional peers, the London SDE does not only focus on a single research platform. Rather, it emphasises the development of data infrastructure and capabilities across the entire region that can support population health and patient care pathways, as well as data environments to enable research and development partnerships.

The SDE is led by OneLondon, as part of the London Health Data Strategy. It has coalesced around three historical components (Figure 1):

  1. London Data Service (LDS): hosted in North-East London, and originating out of Intelligence Solutions for London (ISL), the LDS serves as a data engineering and service layer for pan-London primary care and secondary care data. It handles data extraction and linkage, and provisions data within secure analytics environments for both research and NHS users.

  2. London Research/Analytics Environment: originating from the HDR-UK DiscoverNOW Hub run by Imperial College Healthcare Partners in North-West London, this environment will support governance and operation of secure research environments for academic, commercial, and a unified pan-London analytics platform.

  3. London AI Centre (AIC): a national centre of excellence for applied data science and AI, the AIC provides frontier technology and expert teams that enable multi-modal real-world data, federated analytics and model training, and deployment and validation of machine learning tools.

Figure 1: London SDE Map

A network of data flows

With the NHS under increasing strain, it has never been more important to use patient data effectively - as a resource for improving clinical and operational decision-making, but also as a valuable asset for research and therapeutics development. To achieve this, data must be extracted, curated, joined together, and made available for secure access. This has always been difficult due to the silo-ed nature of NHS electronic systems. Our objective is to break down these barriers to allow entire pathway data to be securely surfaced and flowed to trusted users (Figure 2). The infrastructure that enable these data flows, will also enable deployment of clinical analytics and machine learning tools to inform pathway and operational decisions.

flowchart TD

    d1[GP Surgeries] ==>|Primary care data| LDS1[(London Data Service)]
    d2[NHS England] ==>|Commissioning datasets| LDS1
    d3[Local data sources] ==>|ICS data| ICB

    LDS1==> AIC1a["CogStack in LDS"]
    AIC1a==>|"Unstructured data 
                (primary care)"| LDS1
    LDS1 ==>|"Linked primary and
            secondary care data"| NWL1[("London Research & 
                                Analytics Environment")]

    AIC2["CogStack/OMOP CDM/DICOM
         data lakes/FLIP in Hospitals"]-.->|"Multi-modal hospital 
                                data via federation"|NWL1
    AIC2 -.-> |"Hospital EHR data
                via federation"| LDS1
    LDS1 ==>|"Linked primary and
            secondary care data"| ICB[("Integrated Care Board 'Sandpits' 
                                x5: NEL/SEL/SWL/NWL/NCL")]

    ICB <==>|"Analytics and machine 
            learning collaboration"| AIC3[AIC Roving Teams]
    ICB <==>|Output Sharing| LDS2["Terminologies, Code, 
                                   Model Registries"]
    AIC3 <==>|Output Sharing| LDS2
    NWL1 <==>|Output Sharing| LDS2

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    class LDS1,LDS2 blue
    class ICB lightblue
    class AIC1,AIC1a,AIC2,AIC3 orange
    class NWL1,NWL2 bluegray
    class d1,d2,d3 bluegreen
Figure 2: Summary of London Secure Data Environment (SDE) components and data flows. Each London Integrated Care Board (ICB) is provisioned with its own data/analytics environment through the London Data Service (LDS). AIC = AI Centre; FLIP = Federated Learning and Interoperability Platform; OMOP CDM = Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model; DICOM = Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. London AI Centre components are in orange.

Patient and Public Engagement

To support the SDE programme, OneLondon has engaged in a wide range of deliberative public engagement, including hosting the first ever Citizen’s Summit to deliberate expectations and complex issues around the use of health and care data. In addition, patient and public outreach for uses of data are conducted through Integrated Care Boards, by patient committees in the AI Centre NHS Trusts, and by Discover-NOW.