Platform news

Added instructions regarding rounding to our disclosure control documentation, including an example.

Study definitions can now be “parameterised” so they accept values passed in by the action. This allows multiple cohorts with different properties to be generated by a single study definition.

Added support for querying by first and last day of the (English) school year.

Users of the OpenSAFELY platform use the opensafely tool to run their code locally prior to running against the real data.

This change adds some options to control the concurrency and memory usage of running actions, which should help users manage their local resource usage.

Added ability to filter a patient’s hospital admissions to only those with at least one day in critical care.

We have rolled out a status page for the platform. Services on this page will be automatically updated if incidents occur.

We have clarified in the documentation that data on referrals is incomplete. Any codelists which include referral codes used with patients.with_these_clinical_events are unlikely to return complete data as it is largely held separately in a difficult-to-analyse format. We hope to offer an alternative data source for referrals in due course.

The name of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has changed to COVID-19 Vaccine Vaxzevria 0.5ml inj multidose vials (AstraZeneca). To continue to access data for these vaccines, all users will need to update study definitions appropriately.

Added support for querying the UK Renal Registry

Added support for querying COVID-19 Infection Survey data provided by the Office for National Statistics.

Added support for returning total_bed_days_in_period and total_critical_care_days_in_period from admitted_to_hospital.

Added support for querying the ISARIC (International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium) dataset.

Added support for querying the COVID-19 Therapeutics dataset.

Added ability to query a patient’s place_of_death (TPP backend only).

• Extended mean_recorded_value to support querying for mean recorded value across a full date range, as well as the most recent day of measurement.
  • Docs: cohortextractor.patients.mean_recorded_value
• Added min_recorded_value to support querying for minimum recorded value.
  • Docs: cohortextractor.patients.min_recorded_value
• Added max_recorded_value to support querying for maximum recorded value.
  • Docs: cohortextractor.patients.max_recorded_value

Added support for querying by first and last day of the NHS financial (recording) year.

Show how to extract cohortextractor output in compressed gzip (csv.gz) format - recommended to be used in all studies to minimise file storage size. (However, CSVs can still be used where Stata is used for analysis).

This is now shown in all parts of documentation with cohortextractor steps.

Added support for users to provide their own dummy data.

Added a page in the docs explaining (briefly) how permissions work.

Add ability to query a patient’s health care worker status in vaccination records (TPP backend only)

The OpenSAFELY command-line tool can now start a JupyterLab server. This allows you to easily develop code within the OpenSAFELY Python environment.

Added support for case-control studies