Dundee’s Health Informatics Centre (HIC) success with four real-world evidence projects

Building new UK capacity to access health data research is critically important in continuing the UK’s leadership in health discoveries. The University of Dundee’s Health Informatics Centre (HIC), the Faculty of Health, has won £1.1m in funding to lead one project and partnered with three other projects led by the University of Edinburgh and University of Glasgow.

The four projects - MELODY, SAFEVID, Heal-SCOT, and TransPECT – have been funded through the £3.5m DARE UK research exemplars projects to demonstrate how emerging capabilities within and between UK Trusted Research Environments (TREs) can support real-world sensitive data research. The 12-month projects will explore new capabilities in federated data analysis, AI model training, linkage of health data with environmental data, and safe NLP processing of unstructured health record data.

The HIC team and partners were in London last week as part of a DARE UK Showcase event which included the launch of the eight real-world evidence (RWE) projects. 

Richard Walls, HIC Operations Director and PI of MELODY, says of the projects:

"HIC is delighted to play a leading role in the DARE UK Real‑World Evidence programme. We are proud to lead and collaborate with key clinical and technical research partners across the Scottish Safe Haven Network (SSHN) and the UK Secure Data Infrastructure (NHS Secure Data Environments) to test, evaluate, and deliver impact through four diverse exemplars: MELODY, SAFEVIDS, HEAL‑Scot, and TransPECT.

Our focus is on the safe and secure testing and evaluation of DARE TREvolution tools and approaches, including standards (SATRE), federated network models, artificial intelligence, trusted research environment architectures (K8TRE), metadata frameworks (RO‑Crates), governance models, cross‑sectoral data linkage, and disclosure control solutions (SACRO‑ML). Through this work, we aim to strengthen the resilience, integration, and cohesion of the UK’s critical research and innovation infrastructure".

More details on the RWE projects can be found on the DARE UK website.