Skip to main content
Toggle menu

Search the website

Blog

Latest news and views from around the Bennett Institute

Subscribe to blog updates

  1. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Changes to OpenPrescribing.net measures

    Recently we started reviewing a number of measures that needed the most urgent attention. As a result a number have been updated and a couple have been retired.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    First Impressions of a New Start

    I joined Bennett Institute in August 2021 to work as a data scientist on OpenSAFELY. This blog post describes my experience getting up and running with the OpenSAFELY pipeline.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    OpenSAFELY: Public Opinion

    This week sees the publication of an independent Citizens’ Jury commissioned for NHSx and the National Data Guardian which found that OpenSAFELY was by far the most strongly and consistently supported of all NHS COVID data projects examined.

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    OpenSAFELY: The Origin Story

    On our first anniversary, from the Policy Lead in the Bennett Institute, this is the brief story of the positive side from all our lives: how OpenSAFELY came to life, and what we’ve achieved so far.

  8. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing March Newsletter

    Our latest newsletter including information on: new job roles, hospital only measure, total oral morphine equivalence measures, OpenPrescribing and Bennett Institute Papers.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    Citing and Crediting Codelists: A discussion for the research community

    This is a draft discussion paper, the first of a series exploring “open team science” approaches to managing health data, and specifically how to create a collaborative computational data science ecosystem where the sharing and re-use of objects such as codelists and code is facilitated, encouraged, recognised, and rewarded. As a microcosm of this we have first explored “codelists”. There are currently no ‘answers’ or preferred solutions given. We will be holding an open discussion with the research community on 2nd March at 3pm - you can book to join us here.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter November 2020

    We have been very busy since our last newsletter back in July and there are tonnes of exciting updates for you here!

    Measure Update: Total Oral Morphine Equivalence

    The Faculty of Pain Medicine has recently updated their recommendation on oral morphine equivalence (OME) which we use on our OpenPrescribing measure of OME. We have taken this opportunity to update and a new novel implementation of how we assess OME. Until this work is completed we have taken the decision to “suspend” the measure from dashboards however you can still view the old method using this link.

  11. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Biologic Medicines for Severe Asthma

    Victory! We have the hospital medicines data. Now: biologic medicines for severe Asthma

    In July, Ben and Brian wrote a piece in the British Medical Journal arguing that hospital medicines data should be openly shared. Magnificently, the NHS has now made secondary care medicines data (SCMD) available. You can read the full technical specification of the data here but briefly: it is hospital pharmacy stock control data, which is collected and processed by Rx-Info, and is now published on the NHS Business Services Authority website in the NHS dm+d standard we know, love, and have documented well.

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    OpenSAFELY Cohort Extractor

    This is the code for the OpenSAFELY cohort extractor tool which supports the authoring of OpenSAFELY-compliant research, by:

    1. Allowing developers to generate random data based on their study expectations. They can then use this as input data when developing analytic models.
    2. Supporting downloading of codelist CSVs from the OpenSAFELY codelists repository, for incorporation into the study definition
    3. Providing tools to understand and visualise the properties of real data, without having direct access to it

    It is also the mechanism by which cohorts are extracted from live database backends within the OpenSAFELY framework.

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    OpenSAFELY Job Runner

    This is the repository for the OpenSAFELY job runner. A job runner is a service that encapsulates: the task of checking out an OpenSAFELY study repo; executing actions defined in its project.yaml configuration file when requested via a jobs queue; and storing its results in a particular locations.

    The documentation is aimed at developers looking for an overview of how the system works. It also has some parts relevant for end users, particularly the project.yaml documentation.

  16. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    OpenSAFELY Job Server

    This is the code for the OpenSAFELY job server designed for mediating jobs that can be run in an OpenSAFELY secure environment. The Django app provides a simple REST API which provides a channel for communicating between low-security environments (which can request that jobs be run) and high-security environments (where jobs are run).

  17. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    What is OpenSAFELY?

    What is OpenSAFELY?

    Working on behalf of NHS England we have now built a full, open source, highly secure analytics platform running across the full pseudonymised primary care records of 24 million people, rising soon to 55 million, 95% of the population of England. We have pursued a new model: for privacy, security, low cost, and near-real-time data access, we have built the analytics platform inside the EHR data centre of the major EHR providers, where the data already resides; in addition we have built software that uses tiered increasingly non-disclosive tables to prevent researchers ever needing direct access to the disclosive underlying data to run analyses; code is developed against simulated data using open platforms before moving to the live data environment. Everything has run smoothly. We are fully live inside TPP; we are signed off with full data access and end-stage tech development for the computational platform with EMIS.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing July Newsletter

    OpenPrescribing and Bennett Institute Papers

    It has been a busy month for paper publication at The Bennett Institute. We have written a brief description of the most recent papers below. Please sharewith colleagues and get in touch if you have any relevant observations! Remember you can read all our academic papers related to OpenPrescribing on our research page.

    Hospital medicines data: We are frequently contacted at OpenPrescribing about when we are going to make a hospital version. Unlike primary care, access to hospital medicines data is restricted. The BMJ have just published our Bennett Institute article about why we think The NHS deserves better use of hospital medicines data.