Powering Canada Health Discovery
Lifebit turns Complex Data Governance into Trusted Research Access at Scale
Bringing CanPath’s 350,000-participant dataset into a Trusted Research Environment that respects every regional partner’s governance.
“It is so inspiring and rewarding to see the next generation of researchers engaging with tools and resources like our dataset and Lifebit’s Trusted Research Environment.”
Vicki Kirsh
Scientific Coordinator, CanPath
Challenges
- Diverse regulatory requirements across each of Canada’s provinces
- High risk of transferring data sets directly to researchers
- Sending new copies of data to researchers creates duplicates and multiple sources of truth
- Lack of a standardised analytical environment makes it impossible to teach a core set of analytical skills at scale
- No user access controls, so one can’t confirm that only approved researchers are accessing the data
Outcomes
- Centralised data management improves time-to-delivery for research data requests
- Differential data access controls ensure the right data is shared without needing to create copies
- Platform modularity facilitates alignment to course curricula and workshop learning outcomes
- The flexibility of analytical tooling in the platform means workflows can be executed in minutes instead of days or weeks
impact
100%
Adherence
to pan-Canadian regulatory requirements
140+
Researchers and students
trained in next-gen data analytics in 3 months
50%
Decrease
in time-to-data access and analyses
FAQs
A federated TRE for a federated country
Lifebit’s federated TRE underpins CanPath’s research environment. Researchers submit projects through a single portal; analyses are dispatched into each regional partner’s environment; only governance-cleared aggregate results return.
What the platform does for CanPath:
One front door, many custodians
Researchers see the CanPath cohort as a single entity. Regional custodians retain full control of their own data, environments, and audit trails — the federation layer respects each partner’s governance.
Five Safes by design
Project approvals, researcher accreditation, safe settings, safe outputs, and safe data are enforced consistently across every participating region — without overriding any region’s own framework.
Familiar tools, federated execution
Researchers use Jupyter, RStudio, and standard statistical tooling. The federation layer takes care of dispatching the analysis to the right regional environment and returning only disclosure-controlled outputs.
Next step
Ready to federate your national cohort?
Lifebit’s federated TRE supports population-health research where data must stay with its custodian — whether that’s a province, a hospital, or a country.