Cheshire and Merseyside Secure Data Environment (SDE)
The Cheshire and Merseyside Secure Data Environment is an online platform that securely stores health and care data.
It brings together information from several important areas of health and care within Cheshire and Merseyside. This includes GP practices, community and mental health services, hospital services, and social care.
The Cheshire and Merseyside Secure Data Environment will be used by health, care and research professionals to plan health and care services, carry out research, and make sure that patients receive the best possible care.
The Cheshire and Merseyside Secure Data Environment is part of a wider regional and national NHS Secure Data Environment network, and it will support the new North West Secure Data Environment.
Benefits for Cheshire and Merseyside
Information collected by health and care organisations helps to improve care for patients and speed up diagnosis. It can also help with planning local health services and with researching new treatments.
Data saves lives. It also saves everybody time and the NHS and care services money that can be put back into patient care.
Patient data is already used in research, but Secure Data Environments will standardise this process to make it more efficient and to improve data security.
They have been designed to realise the untapped potential of NHS data by improving:
- Patient privacy – SDEs must ensure information remains confidential at all times.
- Security – NHS data will only be hosted on systems with high levels of protection.
- Efficiency – SDEs enable different sources of data to be linked, giving researchers access to bigger sets of data faster.
Note: In the event of clinically significant incidental findings, there will be a process in place to inform patients via the patient’s direct care team.