30+Billion Health Records. One Secure Platform.

30+ Billion Health Records.
One Secure Platform.

How Telefónica Tech and Starlight Consulting partnered with Oxford University Hospitals to create the Thames Valley & Surrey Secure Data Environment accelerating research, strengthening public trust, and setting a new standard for NHS data collaboration.

24.10.2025 | Highly Commended at HSJ Partnership Awards 2026 Learn more
Case Studies | 15 October 2025

About the Customer

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation (OUH) is one of the largest and most prestigious NHS trusts in the UK. It provides a comprehensive range of clinical, teaching, and research services across four hospitals: the John Radcliffe Hospital, Churchill Hospital, Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, and Horton General Hospital.

With a strong reputation for excellence in clinical care and academic collaboration, OUH is a national leader in digital health transformation. The trust is deeply involved in pioneering research, including genomics, cancer care, and AI-driven diagnostics; working closely with the University of Oxford and other national research bodies.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s ambition to become a data driven organisation led to its pivotal role in establishing and hosting the Thames Valley & Surrey Secure Data Environment (TVS SDE), as part of the national Data for Research and Development programme.

This initiative brings together NHS, academic, and partners including Telefónica Tech and Starlight Consulting to deliver a secure, ethical, and scalable data platform supporting a population of 4.3 million people.

The Challenge

Turning a Data-Rich NHS into a Research-Ready System

The UK has abundant relevant data from the NHS and a range of other sources, but providing access to the right people at the right time in the right way is an incredibly complex task.

The team at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust understood that researchers and analysts need rapid access to real-world data. This includes images such as X-rays and MRI scans, detailed analysis from lab tests and the millions of notes and data points captured as part of day-to-day care in hundreds of electronic patient record and specialist systems. OUH also understood that this must be achieved safely and securely, with public trust at the core.

Traditional approaches to accessing health data for purposes beyond direct care can be cumbersome, slow and ineffective. It can take years to access data from across organisations, only to find that it is incomplete or lacks the granular context required for developing new medicines and training AI models. To achieve OUH’s ambition, they had a number of key hurdles to overcome included:

Fragmented infrastructure: The trust operated a traditional on-premises data warehouse that was siloed across departments and partner organisations, limiting scalability and making it difficult to support growing data volumes or advanced analytics.
Restricted research capabilities: Biomedical research was hindered by slow data access, inconsistent formats, and limited interoperability with external partners. There was no unified environment to support Trusted Research Environment (TRE) standards or secure multi-party collaboration.
Security and governance gaps: Security monitoring and incident response were not centralised or automated, and there was no integrated SIEM/SOAR capability for the Azure environment.
Administrative burden: Clinicians were spending excessive time on IT and administrative tasks due to disjointed systems and lack of self-service tools.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust needed a solution that could unify data across care settings, enable secure research collaboration, and reduce the operational burden on clinical and IT teams

The Solution

Building a Secure, Scalable, and Ethical Data Environment

Strategic Collaboration and Governance

Telefónica Tech and Starlight Consulting worked as a unified delivery team alongside Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to co-design a secure, cloud-based data environment aligned with NHS England’s national SDE mandate. Telefónica Tech was responsible for the design, delivery, and operation of the data integration platform, while Starlight Consulting developed the programme plan, provided delivery leadership, and managed partner engagement.

The objective was to develop a comprehensive dataset by integrating primary, secondary, and ambulance care data with valuable but underutilised NHS resources, including diagnostic imaging, digital pathology, and genomic information. The programme encompasses acute, mental health, ambulance, and community trusts, as well as primary care providers, subject matter experts from academia, the life sciences and technology sectors, local authorities, and crucially, the public.

The solution was built on Microsoft Azure Databricks and designed to support the full lifecycle of data from ingestion and standardisation to secure research access.

Key governance innovations included:

Joint controllership agreements with NHS partners to ensure shared responsibility and trust.
An airlock process to control data ingress and egress, ensuring only approved summary data leaves the environment.
A patient and public access review committee to oversee policies and ensure transparency.
A value-of-data return model to ensure NHS organisations benefit from any commercial research outcomes.

Technical Implementation

The SDE was built using Telefónica Tech’s Data Platform Accelerator Framework for healthcare, enabling rapid deployment and scalability. Within just six weeks, the team stood up the initial environment and began onboarding data sources. The architecture included:

Azure Data Factory and Databricks for orchestration and transformation.
A Medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold) to manage data maturity and quality.
Metadata-driven ingestion pipelines to standardise data from over a dozen contributing organisations.
A Trusted Research Environment (TRE) to provide researchers with secure, provisioned workspaces and tools.

The Outcome

Accelerating Research and Unlocking 30+ Billion Data Points

All healthcare treatments and algorithms stem from research and development. The Thames Valley and Surrey Secure Data Environment (TVS SDE) has sped up secure access to real-world health data, increased benefits for the NHS, and contributed to economic growth.

*Figures correct as of December 2025*

Key outcomes from the TVS SDE include:

Governance

We worked with public partners to co-develop, design and implement a first-of-type governance which facilitates decision making, ethics and compliance with legislation such as UK GDPR. The governance framework required Health Research Authority approval, is enacted with the agreement of partner organisations who collect the data for routine care and sets out how value flows back into the NHS. Patients and members of the public have participated in co-designing governance frameworks, ensuring transparency and public confidence in data use.

Accelerated R&D

Rather than requiring individual approval from dozens of individual NHS organisations, each of which runs bespoke information and research governance processes, projects now have one simple yet robust process to follow to gain access to healthcare data. This alone accelerates project delivery. More than 35 research projects are live, with over 100 approved researchers accessing it securely to study cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. The SDE offers secure access to de-identified data for faster discovery and innovation.

Improving Public Trust

Public partners helped decide to adopt the UK government’s Five Safes framework: Safe Data, Safe Projects, Safe People, Safe Settings, Safe Outputs. The TVS SDE committee which makes final decisions on all projects comprises at least 50% public members alongside experts in health data, ethics and governance.

Improved Data Access

The data platform has processed 30+ billion records from more than 25 source systems, with plans for further expansion. It securely stores, references, and catalogues tens of billions of rows of data, serving as a repository for information from various clinical systems. The data consists of structured entries, such as blood pressure readings, free text notes by clinicians, and other forms like MRI scans, lab results, and medical photography.

175+ future projects

The team have generated a pipeline in excess of over 175 project requests from the UK and international life sciences, academic and healthcare organisations, has multi-million- pound revenues and the service is financially sustainable. The TVS SDE has identified the potential to generate value in the following domains:
- Individual patients, carers or families
- The population in general or specific communities
- The health and care system
- Health and care staff
- Society, including economic benefits and/or benefits to industry/companies.

Safe, Reusable Infrastructure

Unlike traditional research where the data are extracted and analysed elsewhere, the TVS SDE model keeps the data safely stored within the NHS. Researchers are granted secure access to the data they need, and no more. Data is de-identified (so things like names, date of birth and NHS numbers are removed) and the national data opt out is applied. Researchers can remove their findings, for example summary tables, but not the underlying health records.
The platform supports multimodal data and is designed to grow with future NHS needs. It has become a model for other NHS regions and is aligned with national frameworks such as Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model and the Office of National Statistics (ONS) Five Safes model.

What the Customer said

“

Our region was in need of a service that would provide high quality, linked data to support research, development and improvements to NHS services, as well as support the AI revolution. This service needed to go deep: allowing us to access the sort of rich NHS data that is held but rarely surfaced for research. It needed to be scalable – allowing us to deliver world-class data services in a timely manner while keeping costs down and reducing the burden of data collection and curation on our world class researchers and health care professionals. Finally, it needed to be transparent: embedding the patient and public perspective at the heart of our design, delivery and operations. The partnership we established with Telefónica Tech and Starlight Consulting was unique. We worked closely according to a shared vision to build new capability. Each party brought their own expertise and experience to the table, along with a willingness to listen, adapt, and co-create solutions to complex challenges within a changing landscape. Our ways of working and appetite for excellence led to a positive impact on our stakeholders, especially the NHS partners we serve. By fostering an environment of collaboration, our organisations delivered world-leading outcomes that would have be impossible to achieve alone.

Kerrie Woods

Director, Thames Valley and Surrey Secure Data Environment

30+ Billion Health Records, One Secure Platform

Thames Valley And Surrey Secure Data Environment

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What the Customer said

“

"Every day, vast amounts of health data are collected, but much of its potential remains untapped, not just because of time constraints, but because traditional systems made it difficult for anyone to access and use this information effectively. With the TVS SDE, developed in partnership with Telefónica Tech and Starlight Consulting, we’ve changed that. Now, data that was once locked away is available securely and ethically, not only for clinicians and researchers, but for the benefit of patients, public partners, and the entire health system. For example, an X-ray taken after a fall might reveal early signs of lung cancer, an insight that could change a life if spotted in time. By applying AI and making data accessible at scale, we’re enabling earlier interventions, supporting prevention, and helping to address workforce shortages. But the real impact is broader. The SDE empowers everyone involved in healthcare, from patients and carers to policymakers and innovators, to ask new questions and find answers that will shape the future of care. This is just the beginning. By making health data available in the right way, we are laying the foundations for a more responsive, equitable, and innovative NHS one where every dataset can contribute to better outcomes for all."

Professor Jim Davies

Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute and Chief Technical Officer for the Thames Valley & Surrey Secure Data Environment

The TVS SDE builds upon decades of experience working with Oxford University and other partners and is recognised by NHS England as a leading health data asset in the country. Telefónica Tech and Starlight Consulting have worked closely with Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust to provide tangible value to other organisations throughout the programme.

The project has been showcased at significant forums like the Oxford Health Research Showcase, Digital Health Rewired and the Economist AI in Health Summit. It was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.

Technologies Used

Databricks

Azure Databricks was leveraged as the core analytics engine, providing a collaborative environment for data scientists and engineers to develop and deploy machine learning models. Built on Apache Spark, Databricks offered high-performance processing of large datasets, enabling advanced analytics and predictive modeling. Its native integration with Azure ensured streamlined access to data stored in Data Lake and other sources, while its notebook interface facilitated rapid experimentation and iteration. The use of Databricks significantly accelerated the time-to-insight, empowering stakeholders with actionable intelligence to drive strategic decisions.

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Microsoft Azure Data Factory

Microsoft Azure Data Factory (ADF) played a central role in orchestrating and automating the data workflows within the project. As a cloud-based data integration service, ADF enabled seamless movement and transformation of data across various sources, including on-premises databases, cloud storage, and SaaS platforms. Its ability to schedule, monitor, and manage complex pipelines ensured reliable and scalable data ingestion, which was critical for maintaining real-time insights. ADF’s integration with other Azure services also allowed for secure and efficient data handling, reducing latency and operational overhead.

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DevOps including Azure Bicep

To accelerate deployment and ensure consistency across environments, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust adopted Microsoft’s Azure Verified Modules for its Secure Data Environment. These pre-built infrastructure-as-code templates, developed by Microsoft and the wider community, enabled Telefónica Tech to rapidly deploy a secure, scalable, and compliant data platform from the outset.

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Data & AI in Healthcare

Quotes from the community

Non Hill

Public member and member of SARC

I have experience in both health and care research and as a mother caring for my child with complex health challenges. I believe in the value of sharing data for research to support improvements in diagnosis, prevention, treatment and management of health conditions for individuals and the communities in which they live. I have been involved with the development of the SDE from its early stages as a public member contributing to design workshops and as a member of the SARC team. It has been great to see the importance placed on inclusive and meaningful coproduction at every stage. Thank you for listening to us!
Professor Naomi Allen

Chief Scientist, UK Biobank

The TVS SDE provided us with exactly the data we needed. Through them, we were able to obtain digital tumour histopathology data, which otherwise would not have been possible. In particular, they were able to provide a service that redacted the personal identifiers from the pathology reports, enabling de-identified data transfer. The SDE team played a central role to the success of this project, which is helping to pave the way to expand data collection across other regions. These data will support innovative science undertaken by researchers worldwide into the determinants of different molecular cancer subtypes.
Dr Ben Field

Associate Professor of Diabetes and Endocrinology, University of Surrey

I am delighted with the approach that the TVS SDE team has taken to create this new resource, placing the needs of researchers front and centre in every aspect of its design. I am in no doubt that the experience for users will be a massive leap ahead of that provided by other healthcare data resources.
Dr Mayoor Dhokia

Head of Data Research & Advanced Analytics, Health Data Institute, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust

The TVS SDE has been a transformative partner, enabling secure, collaborative access to data that will accelerate our research endeavours and unlock new clinical and operational insights. Their commitment to excellence and responsiveness makes them a trusted ally in advancing healthcare research & advanced analytics.