Game-changing new funding from Wellcome for OpenSAFELY and mental health data

This morning the Today programme on Radio 4 did two great spots on OpenSAFELY. Here are the clips:

So why is OpenSAFELY in the news this week?

Firstly, yesterday, we did a press briefing at the Science Media Centre in London. This was a background explainer about all the work over the past five years in the OpenSAFELY platform, but also how it works, and our plans for the future. Me and Pete Stokes from our team spoke about the unique design of OpenSAFELY (which you can learn more about in this 4 minute video). Liam Smeeth from LSHTM spoke about the power of GP data, and the challenges accessing it (both from a privacy perspective, and a usability perspective) before OpenSAFELY arrived. Michael Chapman from NHS England discussed our work with them on improving access to data for researchers and the NHS.

Then, Tariq Khokhar from Wellcome spoke about their longstanding funding for our work, and - most excitingly - about their substantial new funding for the OpenSAFELY team, formally announced today. This is £17 million in total, in two parts, each with a specific purpose.

£7 million for mental health research

The first award is about connecting data from the NHS Talking Therapies service to OpenSAFELY, so that it can be used in research by analysts across the community.

For those who don’t know, NHS Talking Therapies (previously known as “IAPT”) is a huge NHS service, delivering NICE-recommended psychological therapy for depression and anxiety including cognitive-behaviour therapy, counselling, and guided self-help.

Our OpenSAFELY team designs processes and systems, so we are also longstanding admirers of the design of the NHSTT service itself: alongside human compassion, they have put a huge emphasis on efficiencies and process, so that they can reach as many people as possible within their funding envelope. Because of this, their service delivers talking treatments to an astonishing 600,000 patients in England, every year.

They also collect data from 98% of the people they see. By connecting this data to OpenSAFELY, researchers will be able to analyse anonymised Talking Therapies data, alongside GP records, in a highly secure and efficient setting, for the first time ever.

That could be a game-changer, allowing diverse researchers from around the community to answer a huge range of critical questions on mental health treatment, including:

• How talking therapies affect long-term health outcomes
• Which approaches work best for specific conditions and patient groups
• The best way to deliver services
• The relationship between mental health treatments and physical health

We will also be delivering a new kind of data service for researchers and analysts in this space: it’s under wraps for now, but we will share more soon.

£10 million for ongoing development of OpenSAFELY

We are hugely grateful for Wellcome’s support on NHSTT data, but we are also very pleased to be able to announce that they have also awarded us a further £10 million in core resource for the OpenSAFELY team.

This is critical. It brings stability to our group of software engineers and researchers, who have been pooling skills and knowledge over the years to develop expertise solely focused - perhaps uniquely - on designing better, safer, faster platforms for analysing sensitive personal data.

This core resource will help us design and deliver new methods for making data accessible, more securely and efficiently. By definition, this core resource isn’t tied to a specific timeline of specific products, and that’s a good thing. We have set out a range of new approaches, new tools, and possible future datasets (including non-UK and non-health datasets), and we will work closely with Wellcome to make sure we are meeting their expectations.

But more than any other grant we have had, Wellcome are trusting us to follow the green lights for best impact. We are hugely grateful, but this was only possible because we have already proven we can deliver actual working services, meeting real users’ needs, delivering real research outputs at scale. And that, in turn, was only possible because of our huge productive community of research users and collaborators, alongside the patient data that we are able to help them securely access. So for both of those, again, huge thanks!

And lastly, thanks as ever to all the other organisations who support our work: the Peter Bennett Foundation, NIHR, MRC, and NHS England in particular.

We promise we will put this funding to great use, on one sole aim: designing, delivering, and sharing tangible tools and platforms like OpenSAFELY, that deliver real world outputs, from real users.