Concepts & Standards

There are a number of concepts and standards that TRE Operators should be familiar with in the context of Federated Workflow Processing.

Concepts

Federated Research Patterns

The Federated Research documentation provides an overview of its concepts of “Patterns” and “Weaves”:

Five Safes TES

Standards

These standards are used by the Five Safes TES Weave and Tools. Included below is a brief description of what these standards are and why they have been adopted.

Five Safes

• A set of principles to describe how decisions about granting access to data should be made. Covering Safe People, Data, Project, Outputs, Settings it is a set of interlocking principles
• HDR UK have been a major proponent of the adoption of these principles across the UK health data eco-system. It has become the default mechanism across most domains and is the governance framework in which access decisions are made for HDR UK and DARE UK.

Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH)

• A joint academic and industry programme
• Health Data Research UK and GA4GH have a strategic partnership
• Pre-competitive work to enable global analysis of genomic data
• Produced international standards

HDR UK and DARE UK have funded programmes to understand if the standards developed in GA4GH can be used in wider data environments, and especially within secure data environments for sensitive data.

The Federated Analytics programme in HDR UK and the TREvolution programme in DARE UK have MVPs to demonstrate the utility of these standards beyond health.

Task Execution Service (TES)

• Provides a standard mechanism for orchestrating complex analyses across different compute environments

Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP)

• A standard that describes how health data should be grouped together in a set of common tables (a common data model)
• Created and maintained by Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI)
• Adopted by NHS England Secure Data Environment programme
• Used as a global standard for real world data studies

HDR UK have supercharged the UK efforts in the adoption of OMOP, by funding the conversion of data to OMOP, helping to establish OHDSI UK, and by the establishment of the real-world evidence framework.

The Federated Analytics programme in HDR UK have open-source tools in production that support the conversion of data to OMOP and the discovery of OMOP datasets globally. These are being developed further in DARE UK to demonstrate how they can be deployed across multiple secure data environments.