Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and East Midlands Secure Data Environment data projects
Leicestershire Partnership Trust will continue to manage two legacy projects for East Midlands Secure Data Environment (SDE) beyond Tuesday 31 March 2026.
From 1 February 2026, the East Midlands SDE joined with the East of England SDE to form a new Eastern England SDE, combining both regions. The East Midlands SDE will continue to operate until the 31 March.
The existing East Midlands SDE data projects will be excluded from the scope of the merger and will remain under the accountability of Leicestershire Partnership Trust – the NHS Trust that hosts East Midlands SDE.
The continued management of these projects ensures there is no disruption to ongoing research, governance arrangements, or data access.
All data used within these projects is handled in line with NHS information governance and data protection requirements.
Details of these projects are available below.
East Midlands SDE legacy projects
SLAIDER
Refining a clinical tool to prioritise respiratory admissions
Admissions to hospitals for respiratory-related conditions are a major issue. In 2021-22, there were over 200,000 emergency hospital admissions in England alone – and numbers keep rising.
Clinicians urgently need better decision support tools to prioritise patients more effectively, the real-time identification of changes in patient condition and any deterioration.
SLAIDER aims to produce a proof-of-concept support tool for respiratory emergency admissions, employing a concept known as ‘digital twins.’
This is an Artificial Intelligence based approach which simulates a patient’s future state using both historical and real-time data, predicting outcomes and adapting to diverse types of information. SLAIDER is also designed to manage complex and incomplete datasets.
The SLAIDER-QA project, funded by the Medical Research Council, is headed by the University of Leicester’s Dr Rob Free.
His goal is to implement the platform into hospitals to aid decision-making. Using SLAIDER, doctors would be able to prioritise respiratory admissions through continuous prediction of mortality risk, better understanding of variation and disease progression and identification of patient decline before it occurs.
In principle, this allows earlier clinical interventions – leading to improved patient outcomes and reduced pressure on the NHS.
NHS Trusts including University Hospitals of Leicester are involved in the project. More details on SLAIDER are here.
COLOFIT 2
Improving diagnosis and treatment of bowel cancer using anonymised NHS data
Data from thousands of NHS patients is powering research into better diagnosis and treatment of bowel cancer.
Based on work by clinicians and data scientists in Nottingham, data from patients across the East Midlands will soon be helping to speed up NHS care for those at greatest risk of the disease.
COLOFIT 2 is a scoping exercise whose primary goal is to validate the COLOFIT algorithm using a patient cohort from the East Midlands.
COLOFIT is a model developed to optimise the diagnosis of colorectal cancer in symptomatic patients by using age, sex, faecal immunochemical test (FIT) results, and blood tests; such as mean corpuscular volume (MCV) and platelet count.
This model could reduce the number of required colonoscopies required by patients by approximately 20% compared to the standard FIT strategy; while maintaining similar cancer detection rates and no evidence of missed cancers.
COLOFIT 2 builds on existing successful work in diagnosing bowel cancer, which draws on Nottingham University Hospitals’ integrated analytics team. The research team is led by Professor David Humes, professor of Colorectal Surgery in Nottingham.