Provenance for Trusted Research Environments
Data is transforming health and social care, enabling life-changing discoveries, advancing healthcare services and improving lives. Yet health data providers face challenges in extracting and linking this complex data and safeguarding its safe release for research.
Risk assessments are key to ensuring that providing researchers with access to data does not pose privacy risks – such as by containing identifiable information – and that people’s personal records are processed correctly. However, currently, these governance processes are ad-hoc, manual and time consuming, and may prohibit data release, ultimately limiting new health and social care innovation.
As part of the DARE UK Sara project we have explored how data provenance (metadata that describes the origins, actions performed and agents involved in data creation and transformation) by improving the trustworthiness of how we bring data in and then process and link it to ensure it is compliant for research.
Our tools (TRE Provenance Explorer and TRE Provenance Monitor) aim to assit with semi automated generation and auditing of provenance traces documenting the data linkage process in TRE.
The license for the TRE Provenance Explorer, TRE Provenance Monitor, the SHP Ontology and any supporting examples is CC-BY 4.0.
The TRE Provenance Toolkit includes the resources listed below. Every resource has its own GitHub repository, available in the TRE-Provenance organization:
This work was funded by UK Research & Innovation [Grant Number MC_PC_23005] as part of Phase 1 of the DARE UK (Data and Analytics Research Environments UK) programme, delivered in partnership with Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK)