Other organisations recorded by Europe PMCIND Brian MacKenna 208760 · London School of Hygiene & Tropical MedicineThese are researcher affiliations; the award is counted once under the primary recipient above.
Funding£10.6M
PeriodOct 2024 — Oct 2031
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Every time a GP in England writes a prescription or updates a medical record, that data is now available for research without anyone seeing a patient's name. OpenSAFELY has already given researchers secure access to the linked health records of all 59 million people in England, using new methods that provably protect patient privacy while allowing scientists to work on confidential data. The problem this addresses is a fundamental tension in medical research: the most powerful discoveries come from analysing huge populations, but privacy laws and public trust rightly restrict access to those records. OpenSAFELY’s methods break that deadlock by letting researchers run analyses on encrypted data without ever viewing individual patient information. In phase two, the team will expand beyond health data into consented cohorts, global health datasets, and even non-health data from retail and education sectors. If successful, this could transform how sensitive data across entire populations is used for research—not just for medicine, but for understanding how education, shopping habits, and health interact at a national scale. The platform is already a national research resource funded by NHS England, used by 22 organisations on 155 projects.
View original technical description
OpenSAFELY has unlocked access to an unprecedented scale of health data: the GP records of everyone in England - 59m patients - linked onto other key research and health datasets. We delivered this access by developing new methods that allow us to provably preserve patients’ privacy while researchers work on confidential medical records. We also developed new methods to help researchers make sense of vast health record datasets more quickly, and reliably. By building an innovative team of software developers and researchers, pooling skills and knowledge, we then implement our innovative methods in highly productive working tools and services. These are used by researchers from 22 organisations on 155 projects; the initial OpenSAFELY platform is now a national research resource funded by NHS England. In phase two we will expand our team, delivering new tools and deployments for better access to sensitive data across a range of new domains including consented cohorts, global health datasets, and non-health datasets from sources such as the retail and education sectors. We will achieve this by enhancing our methods and tooling around OpenSAFELY deployments and data management; and expanding our structured approach to discovery and evaluation of new datasets, data centres, and research communities.
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