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Showcasing the Great Ormond Street – Aridhia SDE at HDR UK 2025

Alicia recently attended the HDR UK conference with Ross Stiven, one of our Product Managers and Stephen Mathew our colleague from Great Ormond Street, to promote the GOSH-Aridhia Joint Offering. This collaboration enables other healthcare and research organisations to leverage the capabilities already available in the GOSH SDE.

HDR UK Conference 2025

It was great to attend the HDR UK conference in Glasgow, giving us an opportunity to promote the GOSH-Aridhia joint Offer and also listen in on a number of interesting talks and presentations across both days.

Our stand was well attended, with visitors interests split evenly between the technology which underpins the platform, and the use cases which GOSH have been able to support when using it (see video below). We even had some existing users stop by to compliment us on its usability, which is always welcome to hear.

The talks delivered over the two days highlighted and reaffirmed a number of trends we’ve seen developing over the past 12-24 months, namely:

• The emergence of EHDS
• The adoption of OMOP
• Increasing demand for data federation
• Use of AI in health data research

EHDS:

Gerrit Meijer, the Chief Scientific Officer of Health-RI in the Netherlands gave a good overview of the European Health Data Space. As a TRE provider with European customers and partners, this is obviously a subject of great interest to us, and the talk provided a good overview of the principles underlying the EHDS, and a realistic appraisal of progress to date.

OMOP:

There was only one presentation which was specifically about the OMOP common data model, but it was mentioned in a number of others. Generally speaking where data harmonisation was mentioned in a talk, OMOP was the standard that was either under consideration or already being used by the speaker. This is certainly consistent with our experience in other projects and a major reason why we’re introducing better support for OMOP and other CDMs within the DRE and we have worked closely with several of our existing customers to transform their source data into the OMOP format.

Data Federation:

As with OMOP and data harmonisation, data federation was only the specific topic of a couple of presentations but it was mentioned in a number of others. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that there doesn’t yet appear to be a single definition of what data federation actually means, as speakers seemed to be using ‘federation’ to describe different things. This likely just reflects the fact that widespread adoption of federated analysis is still in its early stages, and we look forward to continuing to help drive this forward.

Use of AI in health data research:

There was a very interesting session on how AI can be securely and ethically integrated in to the analytical workflow of researchers and clinicians. Of particular interest to us were the discussions around how AI can be integrated with a TRE, and how to manage the disclosure risks associated with some type of AI model. As with data federation it feels clear that we are still in the early stages of adoption, and again we look forward to helping expand the art of the possible with our customers and partners.

There were a number of other interesting talks including those from the Mayo Clinic, Our Future Health and UK Biobank. From a UK perspective the most important was the announcement of the Health Data Research Service initiative. While this is still in its vision stage, a £600 million government investment has been ringfenced, signaling major future funding and focus on data research.

The GOSH – Aridhia Joint Offering SDE

The GOSH – Aridhia Joint Offering SDE is available for use by research teams, healthcare institutions, and partner organisations. It provides a secure, collaborative platform designed to accelerate research, enable data-driven insights, and support multi-institutional projects across the healthcare and life sciences sectors. If you’d like to learn more about how this environment can enhance your research capabilities and provide trusted access to data, you can find out more: GOSH – Aridhia Partnership | The GOSH Aridhia SDE for research hospitals or register interest: Registration Form – DRIVE & Aridhia Secure Data Environment.