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]

References

  1. ↑ 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
  2. ↑ "The pandemic has spawned a new way to study medical records", The Economist, 14 May 2020
  3. ↑ "NHS England » NHS expands use of secure COVID-19 research platform to help find new treatments for major killer conditions". www.england.nhs.uk. Retrieved 7 December 2023.
  4. ↑ "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.


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