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The past, present and future of OpenSAFELY: Introduction

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This article is part of a series: The Past, Present and Future of OpenSAFELY

Just before Christmas 2024, we hosted the OpenSAFELY Community Symposium in London, bringing together members of the Bennett team with OpenSAFELY users, partners, funders and collaborators to reflect, learn and discuss. As part of the event, we produced a little printed book, “The past, present and future of OpenSAFELY”. You can download a PDF of the book, but we also thought it would be nice to publish it in a more web-friendly, linkable format.

So this post is the first in a series, in which we’ll re-produce the book on the web.

If you’d like a copy of the print version, we have 50 copies to give away, first come first served - fill out this form if you’d like one.

The book starts with some opening remarks:

England’s GP records have extraordinary power to do good, when they are brought together at the scale of the whole population. But until OpenSAFELY, this power had never been unleashed. The reasons are simple.

GP records contain billions of rows of detailed information: every diagnosis, every treatment, every test, and more, for every citizen in the country. This data can turbocharge research. But those same records also contain, by definition, the most confidential medical secrets for every one of us.

This book describes how we square that circle: how we can give users efficient and productive access to everyone’s data; while also protecting everyone’s privacy.

Solving these problems required a new approach. Our community had to create new working methods, then implement those ideas into working tools and services. This, in turn, required deep, creative collaboration between researchers, software developers, policymakers and innovators.

In the past, “data infrastructure” meant beige boxes in large buildings. In the 21st century, data infrastructure is code, and teams with skills, coordinated in networks.

Building this kind of infrastructure is harder than buying a box. But it is much more exciting, and critical to the future of research!

OpenSAFELY is a free, award-winning digital platform that helps researchers analyse large, sensitive datasets, safely and securely. It’s a huge, highly efficient, highly productive electronic health records platform, built with the NHS, at low cost.

It has a huge user community, with analysts from 32 organisations running 181 projects. Our users have published 86 peer reviewed papers so far, with many more to come.

It operates at unprecedented scale, with access to 58 million full GP patient records inside the secure data centres of TPP and EMIS, the two main suppliers of electronic health record services to GP practices. It also provides linked access to other important datasets including:

Starting in the frantic early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, OpenSAFELY was built to solve one of the biggest problems in medical science: overcoming the inherent tension between the needs of researchers who want to use health data for science, and the needs of patients, who expect their personal information to be kept secret and secure.

OpenSAFELY was designed to balance the needs of both sides. It helps researchers use data to generate insights, while maintaining patients’ personal privacy. It’s open, but it’s safe.

This booklet sets out:

  • how OpenSAFELY works
  • the story of how it was made during the pandemic
  • what results it has brought about
  • some stories from researchers who have used it
  • some thoughts for the future.