Baroness Blackwood has been appointed by the government as Chair of the Health Data Research Service (HDRS) – backed by up to £600 million in funding from the government and Wellcome.
Baroness Blackwood is a recognised leader in life sciences and innovation. She is Chair of Oxford University Innovation and Genomics England and also serves on the boards of biotechnology company BioNTech and investment fund RTW Biotech Opportunities.
HDRS will transform how researchers and innovators access health and care data across the UK by slashing red tape and providing a secure single access point to national-scale datasets.
Currently, obtaining health data can be slow, complex and fragmented. The service will streamline these processes while upholding rigorous safeguards for data security, privacy and ethical oversight, enabling approved researchers to accelerate the discovery of new treatments that will improve patient care.
HDRS links directly to the government’s 10 Year Health Plan and forms part of its modern industrial strategy and Life Sciences Sector Plan, with life sciences identified as a key growth-driving sector that will create high-quality jobs and boost the economy.
Protecting patient privacy is paramount in the design and operation of HDRS. The service will use high security standards with multiple layers of protection – from minimising what researchers can access to using special encryption that makes data unreadable without specific keys.
Researchers will only analyse data in controlled environments where every action is monitored, and the data does not need to leave secure systems. They will only have access to the specific data they need to answer their research question.
HDRS will use innovative techniques like creating ‘synthetic data’ that researchers can work with that mirrors real patterns but does not contain any individual patient information. Strict governance frameworks will ensure that only approved researchers with legitimate purposes can access data.
