Introducing Alberta’s new Trusted Research Environment for medical research data

Alberta researchers have a new way to securely access and analyze health data to advance research and improve patient care.

A new Trusted Research Environment (TRE) provides a secure, governed computing platform where researchers can work with linked administrative and clinical data while patient-level data remains protected within the health system.

Built on the Snowflake data platform, the TRE was developed through a partnership involving Health Shared Services’ Provincial Research Data Services (PRDS),  Alberta SPOR SUPPORT Unit (AbSPORU), the Dianne and Irving Kipnes Health Research Institute at the University of Alberta, through its AI + Health Hub, and the Centre for Health Informatics and the Nelson Pulse Centre at the University of Calgary. The university partnership was facilitated by funding from VITAL.

What it is

The TRE is a secure, governed workspace where researchers can query, analyze and model linked administrative and clinical data. Analysis happens where the data lives. Patient-level data never leaves the environment, access is role-based and logged, and only reviewed, de-identified outputs are released.

How to access it

Submit your request through absporu.ca, which remains the central intake for all research data requests. PRDS will then determine whether your approved project is best served by the TRE, using traditional methods, or direct analytic support. Approved projects receive their own scoped workspace within the environment, and all outputs go through disclosure review before leaving the environment.

Why it matters

The goal of the TRE is to ensure that data drawn from the health system is used to improve it. Ontario’s GEMINI project, now VITAL, showed what’s possible. When hospital data was shared back with clinicians and leaders, the hospitals with the longest stays cut average length of stay by about a day, saving more than 40,000 patient days. Alberta has now joined VITAL and is and active partner in Health Data Research Network Canada (HDRN Canada), enabling cross-jurisdictional analysis while data stays safely behind the health system firewall.

The TRE will also work with universities across Alberta to train the next generation of students and data scientists in translational research.

Get started

Researchers interested in accessing the TRE can visit absporu.ca/research-services to submit a research data request and learn more about available technical, statistical and methodological support.