How is U.K. OpenSAFELY transparent?

• Ben Goldacre and his team at the University of Oxford developed OpenSAFELY, a platform for accessing health records of approximately 58 million people in the UK.
• The NHS holds a single health record from birth to death, with every bit of care provided by the NHS entered into that record.
• OpenSAFELY enables the publication of studies involving data from 20-30 million patients, facilitating important health research while upholding privacy standards.
• OpenSAFELY is a pioneering model for balancing health data access and patient privacy in medical research.
• Researchers are not allowed to enter the strongroom that holds all the NHS records, and can submit queries to the strongroom using the same code.
• Every bit of code a researcher submits is visible to the world the minute it is shared with even one person.
• This feature allows researchers to keep changing the code to access different pieces of data until they get the desired results.
• OpenSAFELY is being used routinely, publishing papers involving data of 20-30 million people.
• The system is a world first in data privacy and transparency, and could be developed for many scales of data in a wide variety of domains.