Project #187:
Describing how pathology tests and their associated data are recorded in OpenSAFELY

Blood tests like liver function tests or cholesterol tests are commonly requested by GPs to help with diagnosing or monitoring disease in a patient. Being so common makes them a potentially important thing to look at in a research study.

These blood tests have been studied to some extent in OpenSAFELY before, but we have not yet taken a deep dive into how well recorded they are in the data. Such a deep dive would allow future studies to be much more confident in how to best use the data, as well as identifying any potential pitfalls that users of the data need to be aware of.

This study aims to create short data reports that describe how reliably test results for a variety of common blood tests are stored in the data. For example how often test results have missing values where we’d normally expect to find them. We will examine how recording varies between different organisations and geographies. We will also look at reference ranges, which are values associated with test results that help clinicians interpret the results.