OpenSAFELY

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OpenSAFELY is a secure analytics platform, interfacing to NHS patient records and enabling statistical analysis of them by medical researchers. The platform was originally a collaboration between DataLab at the University of Oxford, the EHR group at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and electronic health record software companies. [1] The platform is now developed by the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, part of Oxford University's Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. [2]

Initially, it has been used to make an analysis of the risk factors associated with deaths from COVID-19 in hospital in the UK. [3] This is significant because the dataset is especially large, covering about 58 million patients. [4] 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. [5]

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. [6]

In 2025 the OpenSAFELY project was awarded a package of funding from the Wellcome Trust, this included £7 million to analyse the outcomes of talking therapies across the NHS. A further £10 million was awarded to develop data infrastructure, including investigating "new methods for connecting diverse health datasets and enhanced analytical tools for researchers". [7]

References

  1. ↑ "OpenSAFELY: secure access to data to deepen our understanding of COVID-19". NHS Transformation Directorate. Retrieved 4 March 2025.
  2. ↑ "Major investment to transform mental health treatment research and further develop secure NHS data platform". Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. 19 February 2025. Retrieved 4 March 2025.
  3. ↑ Goldacre, Ben; Smeeth, Liam; Bhaskaran, Krishnan; Bacon, Seb; Bates, Chris; Morton, Caroline E.; Curtis, Helen J.; Mehrkar, Amir; Evans, David; Inglesby, Peter; Cockburn, Jonathan; Williamson, Elizabeth J.; Walker, Alex J. (8 July 2020), "OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19 death in 17 million patients", Nature, 584 (7821): 430–436, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2521-4 , ISSN   1476-4687, PMC   7611074 , PMID   32640463
  4. ↑ "The pandemic has spawned a new way to study medical records", The Economist , 14 May 2020
  5. ↑ "NHS England » NHS expands use of secure COVID-19 research platform to help find new treatments for major killer conditions". www.england.nhs.uk. 17 November 2023. Retrieved 7 December 2023.
  6. ↑ "OpenSAFELY: more proof that tackling the coronavirus pandemic does not require privacy to be compromised". Privacy News Online. 23 May 2020. Retrieved 15 October 2020.
  7. ↑ Dimitrova, Galya (20 February 2025). "National health data scheme awarded 'transformative' £17m funding". BBC News. Retrieved 4 March 2025.


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