Data privacy by design: digital infrastructures for clinical collaborations

The clinical sciences have arguably the most stringent security demands on the adoption and roll-out of collaborative e-Infrastructure solutions such as those based upon Grid-based middleware. Experiences from the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project and numerous other real world security driven projects at the UK e-Science National e-Science Centre (NeSC – www.nesc.ac.uk) have shown that whilst advanced Grid security and middleware solutions now offer capabilities to address many of the distributed data and security challenges in the clinical domain, the real clinical world as typified by organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK are extremely wary of adoption of such technologies: firewalls; ethics; information governance, software validation, and the actual realities of existing infrastructures need to be considered from the outset. Based on these experiences we present a novel data linkage and anonymisation infrastructure that has been developed with close co-operation of the various stakeholders in the clinical domain (including the NHS) that addresses their concerns and satisfies the needs of the academic clinical research community. We demonstrate the implementation of this infrastructure through a representative clinical study on chronic diseases in Scotland

Large Scale Document Management System: Creating Effective Public Sector Knowledge Management System

The digital age has redefined the production process and utilisation of documents globally. In the information age, the process of input, delivery, storage, receipt, and categorization of data is critical. The public sector has to rely more and more on automated, reliable solutions in order to keep their information safe and readily accessible for effective governance. A document management system is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management systems often viewed as a component of enterprise content management systems and related to digital asset management, document imaging, workflow systems and records management systems. This paper examines an ongoing document management implementation case study in a public sector of digital assets of over twelve million pages, scalable to billions of pages, highlighting the taxonomy, content and knowledge management creation using an enterprise content management system and discusses the role in national development and growt

Increasing the voluntary and community sector’s involvement in Integrated Offender Management(IOM)

As part of an undertaking to increase voluntary and community sector (VCS) involvement in service delivery, the Home Office set up an initiative to provide small grants to VCS organisations to work with IOM partnerships. The Home Office commissioned an evaluation of the initiative which aimed to: explore the strengths and weaknesses of the funding model; identify perceived barriers and facilitators to voluntary and community sector involvement in IOM; explore how the Home Office might best work with the VCS to encourage and support their capacity to work in partnership with statutory agencies; and identify any implications for the delivery of future similar projects