Transforming South Yorkshire Healthcare: Data Connect and the Digital Health Hub

South Yorkshire is embracing a digital health revolution, enabling ethical health data research while maintaining the highest health data governance, thanks to our partnership with Data Connect.

Glucose monitor on a pink background. — Photo: Nataliya Vaitkevich

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South Yorkshire is embracing a digital health revolution, driven by groundbreaking work from the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub (SYDHH) and its partner, Data Connect. Together, they are reshaping healthcare into a more connected and efficient system by bringing researchers, healthcare providers, and the community together. This collaboration enables ethical health data research, enhances healthcare service delivery, and improves patient outcomes while maintaining the highest health data governance standards.

What is Data Connect?

Data Connect supports researchers in accessing health and social care data by providing guidance and administrative support to navigate complex health data ethics regulations and data governance frameworks. In addition to supporting research projects, Data Connect curates strategically important national and regional health data assets, enabling approved researchers to explore many of the health challenges facing healthcare providers and patients while ensuring responsible data sharing.

All projects supported by Data Connect adhere to strict health data security standards and are accessed via the University of Sheffield's Secure Data Services (SDS) Secure Data Environment. This ISO27001-accredited secure cloud-based platform meets NHS England's Data Security and Protection Toolkit accreditation, ensuring compliance with health information privacy laws.

Key Services Offered by Data Connect:

Streamlined Research Planning: Helping researchers set up impactful studies, identify data sources, design and develop technical solutions.
Secure Data Access: Managing robust data access controls to maximise security and efficiency and protect patient confidentiality.
Smart Data Integration: Processing and linking different data sources, including wearable technology, to create a holistic view of patient health.

Building Trust: The Five Safes Framework

To uphold the highest standards of health data ethics, Data Connect employs the Five Safes framework, a gold standard in data security:

Safe People: Only approved researchers can access sensitive data.
Safe Projects: Data is used for ethical, approved research that must meet data governance requirements.
Safe Settings: Data is stored securely with strict monitoring.
Safe Data: Confidentiality is safeguarded through rigorous de-identification and data minimisation.
Safe Outputs: Results are carefully reviewed to prevent privacy breaches.

This approach ensures data is handled responsibly, fosters public trust in health data research, ensuring compliance with GDPR, NHS data protection policies, and ethical AI frameworks in healthcare. By managing centralised processes, Data Connect reduces the administrative burden on researchers so that they can focus on discovery and innovation. The Five Safes Framework plays a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of this data integration⁽¹⁾.

Advancing Healthcare Through Ethical Data Innovation

One of Data Connect’s most cutting-edge initiatives is its partnership with SYDHH to integrate data from wearable health technology - such as fitness trackers and smartphone health apps - with routinely collected electronic health records. This innovation enables researchers to:

Monitor patient health in real time, ensuring ethical data-driven healthcare interventions.
Predict potential health issues and provide personalised care and treatments.
Support clinical decision-making, using secure health data analytics to improve chronic disease management.

By linking wearable health data with traditional clinical data, researchers gain a more detailed, ethical understanding of patient pathways, enabling evidence-based improvements in healthcare.

Wearable device being checked during exercise. — Photo: Karolina Grabowska

Secure Data Services at the University of Sheffield

The University of Sheffield’s Secure Data Environment (SDS) provides a robust platform for handling sensitive research data, built on a cloud-based platform (Amazon Web Service's (AWS) London servers with the interface designed by RONIN). This environment is specifically designed to provide researchers a safe and secure environment to perform research on all types of sensitive data, including health data.

Key Features of the Secure Data Environment

NHS Accreditation: The system is accredited by the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit
ISO 27001: The SDS is an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified research platform, showing information security management is at the heart of what the SDS provides
Cloud-Based Flexibility: Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the platform offers scalable solutions for researchers, meeting their computing and storage needs

Advanced Security Features

Two-Tier Security Model:
- RONIN Core: A secure environment accredited for internet-enabled research.
- RONIN Isolate: A’black box’ version of RONIN with no internet access, akin to a Data Safe Haven.
Data Encryption: All data held within the SDS is encrypted both at rest and in transit
Access Management: Access to the service requires a University of Sheffield IT account, thus mandating University of Sheffield training, as well as the UoS Virtual Private Network - additionally enforcing use of multifactor authentication

Simplified Resource Management

The RONIN platform makes resource allocation straightforward, allowing:

Budgets to be set for projects, ensuring cost efficiency.
Use of a web interface to manage resources like virtual machines and storage.
Leverage the RONIN Link desktop app for convenient access to tools and data.

By combining these technical features, the University of Sheffield’s Secure Data Service ensures researchers can securely and efficiently analyse sensitive health data, supporting groundbreaking studies that improve patient outcomes across South Yorkshire and beyond.

Why Ethical Health Data Research Matters for South Yorkshire

This collaboration between the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub and Data Connect in the field of ethical digital health research is creating a smarter, more patient-centred and data-secure healthcare system. The benefits include:

Accelerated, responsible health research breakthroughs.
Earlier detection of health problems.
Personalised, better, secure treatment plans.

By combining secure and ethical health data access with cutting-edge technology, South Yorkshire is setting a national and global example in responsible digital health innovation, leading the way in the future of healthcare.

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References

Desai, T., Ritchie, F., & Welpton, R. (2016). Five Safes: Designing data access for research. University of Essex; University of the West of England, Bristol.
Office for National Statistics. (2017, January 27). The five safes: Data privacy at ONS. ONS Blog. https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2017/01/27/the-five-safes-data-privacy-at-ons/
Arenas, D., Atkins, J., Austin, C., Beavan, D., Egea, A. C., Carlysle-Davies, S., ... & Whitaker, K. (2019). Design choices for productive, secure, data-intensive research at scale in the cloud. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.08737.

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