People need to be able to access information about the HRA, work with us and use our services with confidence in how we operate digitally.
We work with our UK-wide partners to provide digital services that support all researchers to plan approve, set up, manage and complete research in the UK. Our research summaries database gives everybody access to information about research studies reviewed by a Research Ethics Committee in the UK. Improving these services will help achieve the government vision for a modern digital government; supporting easier lives, faster growth, firmer foundations, smarter organisations, and higher productivity and efficiency.
Building the foundations of our new digital services is the priority and focus of our next three years. We are developing new services that will digitise the end-to-end research journey, connecting all of the processes for health and social care research in the UK. The new services will be user-centred, making it faster and easier to start research by streamlining research approvals, reducing inconsistencies and duplication in study set up and delivery, and lowering the burden on NHS research and development departments. They will also improve research transparency by making better research information public.
We will also grow our digital maturity so that we can build our new digital services and operate effectively as a secure digital organisation. This will include changing our ways of working so that we can use new technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), well.
Over the next three years we will
Make it faster and easier to use our new digital services to plan, approve, set up, manage and complete research in the UK. We will reduce the burden on users by improving end-to-end flow and replacing manual processes. We will deliver three core platform services by 2027.
Ensure that our digital services are secure. We will maintain and increase the security of our digital services, keeping them available and resilient to cyber attacks and meeting government assurance standards.
Develop safe, scalable and secure digital infrastructure. We will build safe, scalable and secure digital infrastructure and the internal capability to expand, innovate and support future regulatory change.
Use AI well. We will use AI and digital technologies well and find ways to use them more to improve the way we work and our services in a way that people can trust.
This supports the government's ambitions to
- deliver its blueprint for modern, digital government
- create a faster, more efficient, more accessible and more innovative clinical research delivery system – making the UK a world leader in clinical trials
- reduce the time it takes to get a clinical trial set up in the UK to 150 days by March 2026
- bring the benefits of clinical trials to everyone
- cut administrative costs for business by 25% by the end of the Parliament
- meet the commitment for government departments to reduce their administrative budgets by 15% by the end of the decade
- support a thriving domestic AI ecosystem, in line with the UK Government’s AI Opportunities Plan