About OpenSAFELY Interactive

What is OpenSAFELY Interactive?

OpenSAFELY Interactive is part of the OpenSAFELY project. It allows certain OpenSAFELY analyses to be performed via a no code environment, while maintaining the security and transparency upon which OpenSAFELY is built.

Who can use OpenSAFELY Interactive?

OpenSAFELY Interactive is under active development, currently in an early pilot phase, and undergoing initial user testing in a limited group of approved NHS users. A wider user group will be able to use OpenSAFELY Interactive in due course.

What does OpenSAFELY Interactive do?

OpenSAFELY Interactive is accessed via a simple request form. It is an interactive tool that automatically counts, for a selected codelist, the number of events recorded per week in every GP practice using TPP software (~40% of England’s practices), from prior to the pandemic to the latest available date (approximately 1-2 weeks lag time).

What does an OpenSAFELY Interactive analysis output contain?

In the current pilot phase, analyses will return a time trend chart, with practices represented as deciles, i.e. for each week all practice rates are ranked, and only the values for the median (50th percentile) practice, and 10th, 20th percentile, etc. are shown (read more about why it is useful to present practice-level data as deciles).

The report will also display overall summary statistics (total events, number of distinct patients affected) and which five codes in the codelist were most commonly used, with percentages.

How does OpenSAFELY Interactive work?

After logging in, users select a codelist and submit a request. An analysis script is automatically created, from a template, to perform the requested analysis. This script is submitted to the secure datacentre where it extracts data for the selected codelist and analyses it to produce summary data and a decile chart.

Following review by our trained output checking team, the summary data and chart are released from the secure datacentre. A report is built from the released data, and the requester receives an email containing a link to the report.