HST-SAFELINK

Project Vision

Trustworthy and collaborative data linkage holds considerable value for positive health and social care transformation. Personalised medicine, clinical decision and public health policies all depend on better insights extracted from linked data. Accelerating access to linked data is widely expected to “generating useful tools”, “making data analysis more timely”, “generating cost savings” and “delivering interdisciplinary research benefits”.

The underlying premise is that shared data from multiple providers when linked can provide insights and learning beyond what can be gained from one provider alone. However, cross-institutional data linkage is challenging considering the wide-range of socio-technical issues (legal, ethical, operational, trust, etc.) that need to be addressed.

Trustworthy access and data linking will be critical to realise the potential of AI within health and social care, as identified by as one of the biggest sectors with potential to contribute to an expected £630 billion to the UK economy by 2035.

We are investigating safe, privacy-preserving, ethical and risk-aware data sharing and linking between multiple stakeholders for the purposes of transformation of health and social care. Our vision is to establish a Data Governance model that is implementable at the local and regional level.

Project Funding

HST-SafeLink has received funding from the Web Sciences Institute https://www.southampton.ac.uk/wsi/research/research_collaboration_stimulus_fund.page