OpenSAFELY is an interface to NHS patient records which enables statistical analysis of them by medical researchers. Initially, it has been used to make an analysis of the risk factors associated with deaths from COVID-19 in hospital in the UK. [1] This is significant because the dataset is especially large, covering about 58 million patients. [2] In 2023, the NHS announced that it would expand the use of the OpenSAFELY platform to help drive life-saving advances for other major diseases. [3]
The platform interfaces with a secure database of pseudonymized primary care records, and only aggregated results are viewable by researchers. This allows researchers to access a large dataset necessary for identifying potential risk factors without the risks of exposing personal patient information. [4]
An electronic health record (EHR) also known as an electronic medical record (EMR) or personal health record (PHR) is the systematized collection of patient and population electronically stored health information in a digital format. These records can be shared across different health care settings. Records are shared through network-connected, enterprise-wide information systems or other information networks and exchanges. EHRs may include a range of data, including demographics, medical history, medication and allergies, immunization status, laboratory test results, radiology images, vital signs, personal statistics like age and weight, and billing information.
UK Biobank is a long-term prospective biobank study in the United Kingdom (UK) that houses de-identified biological samples and health-related data on half a million people. Volunteer participants aged 40-69 were recruited between 2006 and 2010 from across Great Britain and consented to share their health data and to be followed for at least 30 years thereafter with the aim to enable scientific discoveries into the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.
The University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust provides adult district general hospital services for Birmingham as well as specialist treatments for the West Midlands.
Telepsychiatry or telemental health refers to the use of telecommunications technology to deliver psychiatric care remotely for people with mental health conditions. It is a branch of telemedicine.
The Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) is an observational and interventional research service that operates as part of the Department of Health and Social Care. It is jointly funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). CPRD is working closely with the extensive primary care, topic specific and comprehensive NIHR research networks and with NHS Digital.
Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American publicly traded company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Alex Karp in 2003. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world.
Digital health is a discipline that includes digital care programs, technologies with health, healthcare, living, and society to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery and to make medicine more personalized and precise. It uses information and communication technologies to facilitate understanding of health problems and challenges faced by people receiving medical treatment and social prescribing in more personalised and precise ways. The definitions of digital health and its remits overlap in many ways with those of health and medical informatics.
The UK Coronavirus Cancer Programme or UKCCP is one of the longest running UK pandemic research programmes to safeguard, monitor and protect individuals living with cancer from COVID-19 across the United Kingdom.
The COVID-19 pandemic was first confirmed to have spread to England with two cases among Chinese nationals staying in a hotel in York on 31 January 2020. The two main public bodies responsible for health in England were NHS England and Public Health England (PHE).
COVID-19 apps include mobile-software applications for digital contact-tracing—i.e. the process of identifying persons ("contacts") who may have been in contact with an infected individual—deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The following is a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom from January 2020 to June 2020.
NHS COVID-19 was a voluntary contact tracing app for monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in England and Wales, in use from 24 September 2020 until 27 April 2023. It was available for Android and iOS smartphones, and could be used by anyone aged 16 or over.
Melissa Anne Haendel is an American bioinformaticist who is the Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Medicine. She is also the Director of Precision Health & Translational Informatics, deputy director of Computational Science at The North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute. She serves as Director of the Center for Data to Health (CD2H). Her research makes use of data to improve the discovery and diagnosis of diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Haendel joined with the National Institutes of Health to launch the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which looks to identify the risk factors that can predict severity of disease outcome and help to identify treatments.
Part of managing an infectious disease outbreak is trying to delay and decrease the epidemic peak, known as flattening the epidemic curve. This decreases the risk of health services being overwhelmed and provides more time for vaccines and treatments to be developed. Non-pharmaceutical interventions that may manage the outbreak include personal preventive measures such as hand hygiene, wearing face masks, and self-quarantine; community measures aimed at physical distancing such as closing schools and cancelling mass gathering events; community engagement to encourage acceptance and participation in such interventions; as well as environmental measures such surface cleaning. It has also been suggested that improving ventilation and managing exposure duration can reduce transmission.
Sir Martin Jonathan Landray is a British physician, epidemiologist and data scientist who serves as a Professor of Medicine & Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. Landray designs, conducts and analyses large-scale randomised control trials; including practice-changing international trials that have recruited over 100,000 individuals. Landray previously led the health informatics team that enabled the collection and management of data for the UK Biobank on over half a million people.
This article presents official statistics gathered during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.
The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium was a group of academic institutions and public health agencies in the United Kingdom created in April 2020 to collect, sequence and analyse genomes of SARS-CoV-2 at scale, as part of COVID-19 pandemic response.
The General Practice Data for Planning and Research system was set up by the British National Health Service as a replacement for the General Practice Extraction Service as a means of transmitting data intended for use beyond that of providing individual health care. This might include healthcare planning, or research.
The United Kingdom's response to the COVID-19 pandemic consists of various measures by the healthcare community, the British and devolved governments, the military and the research sector.
The following is a timeline of the COVID-19 pandemic in England during 2022. There are significant differences in the legislation and the reporting between the countries of the UK: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.