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Platform news

  1. Exposing more columns for HES data

    We have exposed two more columns on the admitted patient care table from the HES data: discharge_destination and discharge_method. These are examples of data that are held in the backend database, but that had not been exposed via ehrQL. We’re always happy to add existing data to ehrQL, but typically we wait for…

  2. Exposing the Decision Support Values table in ehrQL

    We have made the TPP DecisionSupportValues table available in ehrQL.

  3. OpenSAFELY codelists add command

    We have improved the way in which codelists can be added to an OpenSAFELY project. Previously, to add a codelist to a project, one had to manually add a codelist and version identifier to the codelists.txt file, then run the opensafely codelists update command to download it. This method is still supported. We have…

  4. Updated NHS Digital Primary Care Refsets

    Many OpenSAFELY studies have made use of the NHS Digital Primary Care Domain Reference Sets [archived here]. These are republished on opencodelists.org under the NHSD Primary Care Domain Refsets organisation to make integration of these reference sets into your study easy. Based on user feedback, we have updated…

  5. Improved autocomplete for ehrQL

    We have made significant improvements to the autocomplete behaviour when writing ehrQL in VSCode, both locally and in online codespace environments.

  6. New VS Code extension to help with writing and testing ehrQL

    We have released a new extension for VS Code and Codespaces to help users test their ehrQL queries against tables of dummy data. You can read more in the documentation, or try it out by following the updated ehrQL tutorial.

  7. Updates to ehrQL tutorial

    We have recently published a significant update to the ehrQL tutorial. The tutorial now walks you through using ehrQL to identify patients who should be on the QOF register for diabetes, and to categorise patients on the register according to various QOF business rules. You can work through the tutorial…

  8. Improved handling of all_diagnoses and all_procedures fields

    We have added better handling for the all_diagnoses and all_procedures fields in the apcs table. These fields contain every diagnosis (ICD10 codes), and each procedure undertaken (OPCS4 codes), during a hospital spell. The field is a list of clinical codes, joined together with ,s and ||s (see the above links for more details on why).

  9. OpenSAFELY publication approval process update

    Dear OpenSAFELY users, If you have submitted work for publication approval, we appreciate your patience with our delay in providing a response. We look forward to sending you a response as soon as this is possible. A rapid review of the publication approval process was recently prompted by a number…

  10. OpenSAFELY data update

    Dear OpenSAFELY Users, We previously communicated that we had to temporarily remove all deregistered patients from the population available in OpenSAFELY-TPP. This was to ensure that we respected all Type 1 Opt-outs, and allowed us to reopen earlier, but introduced substantial difficulties with the representativeness and usefulness of the data.

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