London Secure Data Environment

The London Secure Data Environment has been developed to transform health outcomes in the city. It houses a longitudinal patient record for residents, which exists to help clinicians and analysts derive insights that can be used to improve health services and outcomes for Londoners. This means enabling more proactive care delivery to individuals, supporting better planning for local communities, and enabling more powerful academic and commercial research and development. These activities underpin London’s strategic objectives to shift care from hospital to community, from treatment to prevention, and from analogue to digital.

The London SDE is developed by the OneLondon programme, a partnership of London’s five integrated care systems (ICSs) and three health innovation networks. ICSs encompass NHS provider trusts, general practices, local authorities, and higher education institutions.

Our aim is to create one of the largest data assets in the world, covering all settings of care. The London SDE already hosts longitudinal linked records for 2.8 million Londoners, and we aim to scale this to all of our 10.8 million registered and resident population by the beginning of 2025/26. In doing so, our commitment has been to design the SDE in ways that enact the recommendations of London’s large-scale citizens’ summits and to operate the SDE in ways that continue to demonstrate trustworthiness to all of London’s residents.

As a global city, with a diverse population and some of the world’s leading research institutes, the London SDE offers unparalleled opportunities to undertake academic research, technology development projects, and to improve patient care.

The information below provides a summary of the services provided to researchers by the London SDE. Contact us if you have a specific requirement not explicitly identified below - we will be delighted to discuss how we can best support you.

A secure workspace within the SDE will be implemented for each project. The standard package for a secure workspace includes a cloud-based VDI providing access to an instance of the platform, a suite of included tools, and support capabilities.

Technical summary

A secure Windows (Azure) VDI

Included tools

Azure | Azure BLOB Storage | Azure Data Studio | Azure Machine Learning (ML) | Conda | data build tool (dbt) | Excel | Notepad++ | Python | R Statistical Language | RStudio | Tableau | VDI - Windows (Azure supported) | Visual Studio (VS) Code 

Optional tools (may incur additional service charges)

Anaconda Python | Jupyter Notebook | SPSS | Stata.

Additional platform services

1. Submit a request for a third-party tool that is not part of the secure workspace standard package.
2. Secure workspace decommissioning and removal.
3. 'Bring your own code': users have the ability to bring their own code to be used within the Secure Workspace.
4. 'Bring your own tool': users have the ability to bring their own tool to use for analysis purposes within the secure workspace.

All requests for additional services are subject to SDE approval.

We offer a range of consultancy services to support research projects. These include:

• clinical support and expertise
• contracting and legal support
• data analyst (senior level)
• data scientist
• epidemiological analysis ability
• feasibility
• health economic evaluations
• health economist 
• health implementation
• medical writing support
• patient identification and recruitment
• project management
• retrospective studies

We can provide curated published datasets from:

• primary care
• secondary care
• prescribing
• community
• mental health
• demographics
• social care

In addition to curated datasets, we also offer:

• a 'bring your own data' service (publicly available/reference)
• a 'bring your own data' service (identifiable/cohort)
• to provide a synthetic dataset
• the option to request an unpublished, bespoke dataset

A full list of available datasets is published on the HDR UK Health Data Gateway.

To find out more about London SDE:

• email the team at [email protected]
• visit the London SDE webpage