Data Custodians
The Gateway is the UK’s portal for data discovery and tools for health research and innovation.
 
Making data discoverable through the Gateway helps custodians make data FAIR (Findable, Discoverable, Interoperable and Re-usable) and reach a significant and growing community of innovators. The Gateway also offers an online solution to data access management, that has been developed following best practice and ensures safe use of health data for research while safeguarding patients privacy.
 
 
 
Showcase


The Gateway provides a common entry point for innovators to discover and request access to your datasets.

With an average of 10,000 searches a month and over 2000 active users, the Gateway can help improve the discoverability of your datasets. By joining the UK Health Data Research Alliance you have the opportunity to adopt national best practice and align your processes with UK data custodians. The aim of the Alliance is to harmonise the principles, definitions, process and information requested to develop a best practice governance framework for assessing requests to access UK health data. You can find out more here.

 
 
Partnership


Through our work with the UK Health Data Research Alliance and the National Core Studies project, we have been working with our partners to develop health metadata standards to improve the discoverability and accessibility of data. Our partners have responded in kind with the development of new federated metadata catalogues leveraging metadata standards and the development of APIs as part of the UK Health Data Research Alliance.

We are working with even more partners to improve health data discoverability and streamlining accessibility both directly with each data custodian and with a four-nation view through the HDR Innovation Gateway.

 
 
Support


The Gateway provides a free and easy to use end-to-end Data Access Request (DAR) management system. This enables you to review detailed information about each request and for you to provide a safe and efficient route to access the data you manage.

The Gateway provides supportive functionality by enabling secure communications between requestor and you in advance of submitting a DAR.

An option to have a customisable DAR form for your organisation built around the established Office for National Statistics 5 Safes framework, helping you to streamline DARs by ensuring the access requests have considered all best practice aspects of using data as part of their research. More info here.

 
 
Efficiency


A set of fully functional APIs enable you to integrate the Gateway discovery platform into your own access management system offering you the additional discovery reach of the Gateway, whilst ensuring a streamlined, single system data access administration experience for your organisation.

Researchers and Innovators can request multiple datasets from your organisation as part of a single access request and both you and the requesters can manage and monitor these DARs.

 
 

How can I get involved?

  • Interested in listing your dataset on the Gateway and/or becoming a member of the UK Health Data Research Alliance? Get in touch here.
  • Sign up to our Gateway newsletter to stay up to date on new developments, datasets and events.
 

FAQs

Find our FAQs here.