Research-ready Infrastructure for Secure Mental Health Data Analyses

The importance of Research-Ready infrastructure in the data research pipeline. Research projects rely on accessibility of data which are also deemed to be of research-ready quality. Researchers themselves do not necessarily have all the skills to be able to implement secure environments to be able to access and analyse data securely. Having a trusted research environment (TRE) designed and constructed by research software engineers/research technical professionals gives researchers access to the data securely, allowing them to focus on their analyses. The Mental Health Innovation for Research Centre (MRIC) programme was set up with aim to improve mental healthcare by shortening the time it takes to translate research into real benefits for local communities. One of the ways it does this is by providing a secure infrastructure platform which allows researchers to access and analyse mental health data from the Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust securely at the University of Liverpool. This has involved work with numerous technical areas such as data pipelines, data ingestion, landing zones, secure data storage areas, trusted research environments and data cataloguing, to name but a few. The aim of this poster is to showcase how some of these techniques have helped to build this environment and how they enable researchers to be able to conduct their research safely.