Towards A Framework For Risk Assessment Supporting Data Provenance And Free-text: Protoyping Semi-automated Tools For Trusted Research Environments (TREs)

Data is transforming health and socialcare, enabling life-changing discoveries, advancing healthcare services, and improving lives.Yet health data providers facechallenges in extracting and linking this complex data and safeguarding its safe release forresearch. Risk assessments arekey to ensure that data releases do not pose privacy risks,such as containing identifiable patient information or that patients’records areprocessedcorrectly.However, currently thesegovernance processesaread-hoc,manual,time consumingand may prohibit data release, ultimately limiting new health and social care innovation.

This project will focus on deliveringsemi-automated tools to improve two areas ofrisk assessmentand monitoring: Data provenance, improving trustworthiness of data ingestion, processing and linking, making sure it is compliantfor research;andPrivacy assessment, minimising the risk ofidentifiable informationinclinicalfree-textrecords (e.g. GP letters, discharge summaries). Public involvement and engagement arecentral to our project, ensuringrisksare properlyidentified andaddressed,and our methods are transparent and understandable.

Our collaborativeapproach will producean implementable toolkit for all health data providers across the UK. Thisprojectofferssignificant benefits for data audit and release,improvingconsistencybetween organisations,access time for researchersandpromoting access to data thathas notbeen feasible before.