Data Assets

Data Assets and Sources

The Imperial SDE provides access to a growing portfolio of curated health and care datasets for approved research, evaluation and clinical analytics. The iCARE team maintains and develops these datasets, including creating bespoke datasets to meet specific research needs.

Scale and Diversity of Data 

The data assets within the Imperial SDE span a diverse North West London population of approximately 2.4 million people across 346 GP practices, representing more than 200 ethnic groups and 60 languages and a broad socioeconomic spectrum.

Learn more about iCARE’s commitment to the communities whose data we use and represent.

Looking at only the ICHT tenancy, iCARE provides access to approximately 2 million patient records across 24 specialist datasets, comprising more than 3,500 tables and 55 billion rows of data, with data refreshed on an almost daily basis.

Available research datasets

Our available datasets:

• Details of the iCARE Data Model - Data Dictionary (XLS)
• Details of the Whole System Integrated Care database
• Details on our NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative datasets
• Some of our datasets can also be found at HDR Innovation Gateway

Selected datasets are also available through the HDR Innovation Gateway. iCARE is transitioning to the Gateway as the central platform for its dataset metadata.

New database curation 

The Imperial SDE allows for the curation of new, bespoke patient datasets. The iCARE team can bring together relevant data sources and develop research-ready datasets for approved projects.

Data Linkage and Emerging Data Assets

Linkage between tenancies 

Data can be securely linked across tenancies, where approved, enabling researchers to combine complementary data sources while maintaining appropriate governance and access controls. Click here for more information.

Care Information Exchange

The Imperial SDE is connected to the Care Information Exchange (CIE), a patient-facing electronic health record, enabling research that incorporates patient-facing health information and supports direct patient engagement.

Linked clinical imaging

The iCARE team are developing the capability to link routinely collected patient data with de-identified clinical images for the same patients. The SDE provides the storage and computational capacity to support large-scale imaging datasets.

Linked tissue bank datasets 

The SDE will also support de-identified datasets linked to the Imperial College Healthcare Tissue Bank, enabling clinical data to be combined with tissue-related information for research.