Digitalisation increasingly influences all areas of research, particularly data management processes such as data generation, accessibility, and analysis. In the health sector, digitalisation has led to the rapid growth of digital health data. For instance, the digital acquisition of electrocardiograms (ECGs) resulted in a vast amount of data, exploitable for biomedical research. This work aims to provide an overview of the various sources of clinical data used in research, their access pathways and bottlenecks encountered throughout the data acquisition and utilisation process by researchers and their institutions.