HDRS funds 43 technical transformation projects 

Applications were assessed against a range of criteria, with the top priorities being strategic fit and reusability. Each bid was scored independently by external panellists and HDRS. 

The 43 funded projects are: 

1. CARDINAL-DATA: extends the cardiovascular-renal-metabolic data specification already proven in the London SDE 
2. TETHER: prototypes automated data quality monitoring across the Scottish Safe Haven Network and stands up a data virtualisation layer for the first regional safe haven 
3. Wessex SDE HRA Amendments as a National Exemplar: develops, tests and publishes a standardised HRA and CAG amendment route others can reuse 
4. Making secondary care medicines data research-ready: develops the standards and tooling to make hospital prescribing and high-cost drugs data research-ready 
5. STAR-Lab: evaluates large language model de-identification of pathology and microbiology free text across four Scottish Safe Havens 
6. RADIX on FHIR: builds Epic and Cerner adapters into a FHIR common data model with automatic OMOP mapping 
7. PRANA: creates reusable pipelines and data dictionaries for onboarding ambulance, air ambulance and trauma data 
8. MINDS: safely linking existing data within the London SDE to enable research into shared conditions within families
9. Waveform Integrated Research Environment (WIRE): captures high frequency physiological waveform data from routine care and links it to the health record 
10. TRACE: checks that each SDE’s mapping routes produce the patient population a study intended, before federated analysis 
11. Adopting the OneLondon Primary Care Data Pipeline: adopts OneLondon’s existing extraction and conformance service to give Wessex a routinely refreshed primary care dataset 
12. Platform as a Service (PaaS): operationalises a shared cross-SDE model for provisioning researchers’ analytical environments through a common service 
13. NHS-accessible secure compute on national AI Research Resource infrastructure: builds a trusted research environment on national supercomputing capacity, and works out the approvals and information governance route NHS data would need 
14. Pathfinding on OpenSAFELY tools in the NHS England National SDE: tests whether the OpenSAFELY ehrQL approach can prepare HES data for national SDE users 
15. BEACON: improves metadata coverage and quality across the Scottish Safe Haven Network so available data is easier to see 
16. Airlock Decision Hub: develops a reusable workflow and audit layer for reviewing and releasing outputs from secure environments 
17. SPARK: works with GP practices to bring primary care data into two further Scottish safe havens 
18. Integrating OpenSAFELY tools into the South West SDE: assesses what adopting OpenSAFELY’s data management and federated analytics in a regional SDE would take 
19. Reusable Technical Capability for Research-Ready Dementia Datasets: develops reusable validation, quality assurance and OMOP transformation components for dementia datasets 
20. Enabling Secure Access to Sovereign AI Infrastructure: develops the governance framework a regional SDE needs to apply for access to national AI compute for section 251-supported research 
21. 1DQ: builds a primary care data quality toolkit that identifies test patients and recovers lost or overlapping registrations 
22. Southern Partnership Single Point of Access – DAC Rapid Accelerator: develops a shared review route across the Southern Partnership’s three data access committees, which keep local decision rights 
23. Implementation of the Diabetes core dataset, DIA-core: implements the agreed UK diabetes core dataset in a further SDE, with open code and documentation for wider roll-out 
24. The Epi700 Multimodal Exemplar: tests a cloud-agnostic reference design for linking clinical, molecular and digital pathology data inside a secure environment 
25. Transfer of All Wales Medical Genomics Service VCF data to SAIL: builds an automated pipeline bringing Welsh genomic sequencing data into SAIL as a continuing feed 
26. National rare cancer tissue discovery: builds a national rare tumour catalogue and a connector each tissue bank runs locally 
27. Expanded data availability across DigiTrials Feasibility Self-Service: expands the priority datasets and reusable metadata available through Feasibility Self-Service 
28. Moving towards a national Federated Learning network: aims to let a site stand up a federated learning node in days using infrastructure as code 
29. HARMONY: pilots a federated dermatology imaging platform so skin cancer AI can be validated on UK data 
30. CoFIND: builds the technical plumbing for one governed cohort discovery question across several environments, returning aggregate counts 
31. Building Reproducible Pipelines for Health and Social Care Research in Northern Ireland: moves data preparation from project-specific scripts to version-controlled, reusable pipeline components 
32. ANCHOR: co-designs a risk-based information governance framework across Scotland’s application routes, with scrutiny proportionate to risk 
33. UNIFY: prototypes a single digital enquiry route and shared triage service across Scotland’s five safe havens 
34. SCAMPI: packages proven imaging tools into a lightweight, open-source DICOM processing platform deployable on existing infrastructure 
35. Defining an Interoperable Data Product Summary: defines a consistent, machine-readable description of a region’s data, population and analytical capability 
36. SENTINEL-AI: demonstrates a federated framework for continuous evaluation and post-market surveillance of clinical AI across three sentinel sites 
37. Project Iceberg: builds a reusable service turning unstructured clinical text into research-ready data, with clinical review and provenance 
38. NHS DigiTrials Recruitment Connect: develops the route for a regional SDE to pass an eligible cohort to DigiTrials 
39. Fabric: Core Development: takes the federated data fabric from feasibility to production software, using agreed storage formats and catalogues 
40. Federated and Harmonised Multi-SDE Linkage: connects existing node software and harmonisation tooling into a shared coordinating layer across SDEs 
41. A Blueprint for Regional SDEs: draws on the experience of three regional SDEs to publish a reference architecture and shared methodology 
42. Extending OMOP auto-mapping for Brain and Mental Health: extends automated OMOP mapping from mental health into neurosciences and other data sources 
43. SCALA: creates a standardised Scotland-wide laboratory data asset that can be generated on demand per cohort 
    

Read more about how HDRS reached its funding decisions here.