PANORAMA is helping Yorkshire and Humber Secure Data Environment (SDE) work together with North West SDE and North East and North Cumbria SDE more easily by tackling the technical, legal and governance barriers.
Federation allows researchers working within SDEs to securely analyse data across multiple environments without moving or duplicating the data. While this approach can unlock richer insights and support large-scale studies, it also introduces complex challenges around governance, technical compatibility, and public trust.
PANORAMA (Pan-North Data Research Advancements for Multi-Domain Access and Analysis) is working to address these challenges in practice, ensuring that standards and innovations are co-designed with professionals and the public. A collaboration between NHS and university partners, PANORAMA is one the DARE UK Early Adopter projects launched earlier this year (March 2025) and covers more than 15 million people across the North of England.
By the end of the project, the PANORAMA team wants to show how data research across the North of England can be done more safely, efficiently, and consistently, and the potential for the whole of the UK. The team aims to:
- Build a pan-North Information Governance framework – providing a clear set of rules and processes based on the Standardised Architecture for Trusted Research Environments (SATRE) specification to enable TREs to work together more easily.
- Test federated analysis and AI-supported research output checking – assessing how well these tools work across different SDEs.
- Test federated analytics tools – piloting tools that allow researchers to run analyses across different data environments without the data ever leaving its original location.
- Produce practical guides – creating simple, step-by-step resources to help TREs adopt standardised architectures, federated analysis tools, and AI-supported research output checking consistently.
- Share what we learn – producing a report on public and professional engagement to make sure the solutions meet public benefit and ethical standards.
The PANORAMA team has taken significant steps forward towards achieving their goals. In the first few months, the team has:
- Run a Citizens’ Jury on federation of sensitive data, with findings feeding into ongoing engagement.
- Begun developing a new engagement dashboard to ensure fair and inclusive recruitment into public activities.
- Identified information governance pathways for federation, to be tested with professionals and the public.
- Installed and tested technical components to enable federated querying across environments.
- Completed infrastructure to support the installation of AI-supported research output checking tools across three platforms.
- Developed policies to help Data Access Committees assess public benefit and ethical safeguards for AI and Machine Learning research.
Looking ahead, the PANORAMA team will continue involving professionals and the public across the North, develop shared governance standards, and refine the technical integration of tools and software enabled through TREvolution into real-world data environments.
PANORAMA is putting the tools and standards assembled through TREvolution into practice. By piloting federated analysis, governance models, and AI and Machine Learning output checking across multiple SDEs, PANORAMA will generate practical insights and guidance to inform national adoption.
The project has already attracted national and international attention, with invitations to present its work at conferences, showing its importance not just for the North of England, but for the UK and the wider data research community.
The DARE UK Early Adopters are pioneering projects helping to put the standards and innovations assembled through TREvolution into practice. Working across more than 10 Trusted Research Environments (TREs), including five sub-national NHS SDEs in England, these projects bring together researchers, TRE operators and members of the public. Their role is to test the new approaches in real-world settings, making sure they are practical, effective and safe before being more widely adopted for research in the public interest.