Members of the Bennett Institute will be introducing OpenSAFELY, the electronic health records platform for securely and transparently using GP data from England for research and analytics. We’ll talk about why OpenSAFELY exists, how it’s different from a classic Trusted Research Environment, and how you can get involved. We’ll hear from a researcher using the platform, and there will also be a live demo of ehrQL, our custom coding language.

The desired audience: Anyone interested in how real-world data can be used to answer research questions; epidemiologists; data scientists; medics interested in the GP profession.

The programme:
10am – 10:30am: Ben Goldacre will speak about the history and impact of OpenSAFELY, and its technical functioning.
10:30am – 10:50am: Martina Pesce will speak about the experience of using OpenSAFELY as a researcher, and what the applications process looks like.
10:50am – 11:15am: Eli Holderness will present a live demonstration of the OpenSAFELY tooling, including creating codelists with OpenCodelists and using those to write ehrQL code.