Minister for Health enables secure access to COVID-19 Data Research Hub
Today, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly TD, has launched an initiative to facilitate safe and secure access to COVID-19 data for valid health research purposes. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has been maintaining a COVID-19 Data Research Hub since April 2020. To date this data has been used solely by a sub-group* of the National Public Health Emergency Team to conduct statistical analysis on healthcare data. Now, in partnership with the CSO and the Health Research Board (HRB), an application process has been put in place to enable registered researchers to apply to access the data for research purposes. A series of safeguards have been put in place to protect patient privacy under stringent and transparent rules while advancing our understanding of COVID-19 for the benefit of people’s health, patient care as well as health care policy and planning. Following a rigorous approval process, successful researchers will only have access to data from which all identifiers such as names and addresses will be removed.