The UK possesses a wealth of health and administrative data, made available for research through multiple data providers and infrastructures, spanning the NHS, academia, government agencies, and commercial platform providers. These infrastructures currently operate in silos which have been created by the different levels of development of the systems linked to national and regional data providers, as well as the natural devolution of health administration across each of the constituent countries of the UK, which has led to whole-UK studies being difficult to run from a technical, data access, and data standardisation perspective.
Federated Data Science (FEDS) UK is a consortium of leaders in the field of emerging federated analytics solutions which aspire to change the siloed landscape of UK data access and analyses, building on initial investments and ongoing efforts from the Data and Analytics Research Environments (DARE) UK initiative in 2023, and embedding a network of use cases and scientific leaders in this space via Health Data Research (HDR) UK and data partners who have provided letters of support to signal their intent to liaise with FEDS UK to deploy and connect to the proposed unified technology stack, which is an enhancement of technologies piloted in 2023 by combining them and introducing a federated architecture for analytical delivery with options included for end users.
This federated approach to data science and analytical delivery is not currently available in the UK. FEDS UK will, therefore, provide efficiencies in the deployment of analytics across an array of networked health data infrastructure and enhance findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data services as an output of the instantiation of federation across UK health data providers.
The program will work openly with as many existing communities or projects/programmes as possible to ensure it stays strategically aligned with national and international initiatives. Examples of such are:-
GA4GH - to drive the adoption of existing international standards and tools to bring interoperability between UK TREs and SDEs.
ELIXIR - to ensure we are in step with European initiatives, such as the European Open Science Cloud, so that we can plug into a more comprehensive European infrastructure.
HDR UK - leveraging the emerging federated analytics programme and the existing driver programmes into the national health research agenda and data usage register and connecting this to our TRE network that spans beyond HDR UK centres.
ADR Wales - to ensure our approach works across and between current domain silos to facilitate research that common traditional and nontraditional health data.
ADDI - to connect our newly enhanced UK network to existing international programmes and a ready use-case in dementia-related research.
BioFAIR - an emerging FAIR programme across biological data assets, bringing best practices and infrastructure for life science researchers.
NHS SDE Programme
From initial solutions which have been created by Swansea University (Teleport), University of Nottingham and The University of Manchester (TRE-FX) and the general concept of federated research object deployment (University of Manchester/ELIXIR), FEDS UK will create an open-source collection of software that will deliver a federated UK network of connected TRE/SDEs. All existing software stacks will be combined into a single platform, which will then be further enhanced to meet our partners' emerging needs and governance model requirements and enable expanded use cases such as federated learning.