ccdata is an R package for working with the Critical Care Health Informatics Collaborative's data set. Since 2014 data from the critical care units at Cambridge, Guys/Kings/St Thomas', Imperial, Oxford, and University College London has been extracted and stored securely in a standardised format.

The purpose of the project is to enable researchers to answer clinical questions that are important to patients, but which are normally too difficult because data is unstandardised, siloed, and inaccessible.

These data are crucially needed by healthcare professionals for the delivery and continuity of care; by administrators for audit, planning and service improvement; and by academic and industry researchers for the translation of scientific progress into patient benefit. Through this process, CC-HIC can improve patient outcomes, reduce the costs of care, and accelerate the pace of translational health research.

The physical database is held at the UCL IDHS within the Information Services Division of University College London (UCL). UCL manage and ensure that the database and the surrounding governance structures are appropriate for holding identifiable and sensitive NHS data. The safe haven is compliant to NHS Information Governance Toolkit Level 2 and operates to the ISO 27001, the Safe Haven already holds identifiable, sensitive NHS data for secondary purpose. The Critical Care HIC management group will maintain oversight and be the point of contact for researchers wishing to access data.

The security put in place to ensure the safety of this resource inevitably creates challenges for the researchers. We have therefore created a three sided tool to make CCHIC research ready.

• this shared code library
• an anonymised development data set
• a virtual machine for simulating work within the safe haven

A quick slide show that summarises this approach.

• Data Processing Pipeline
• Installing ccdata
• Using ccdata
• Utilities from ccfun
• Analysis template
• Data set 1.0