OpenSAFELY testimonials
“People don’t realise how significant this project is. It solves many of the major technical, ethical and research challenges of using EHR data for research. This approach should be much more widely adopted for making use of all the data we collect (at great expense!) in healthcare.”
– Chris Paton, Editor in Chief, BMJ Digital Health and AI
“It’s not often that new technologies which challenge current ways of working come into being. Borne out of the pandemic with the need for urgent analyses, OpenSAFELY is one such technology which shows great promise given its commitment to open ways of working and its principle of allowing questions to be asked of the underlying health data without copies of event level detail leaving the secure environments in which those data naturally reside. OpenSAFELY is a rich resource that can answer the questions of our time in ways that respect the provenance of the underlying data. This will give our patients confidence that insights derived from their histories are developed safely, appropriately and in the public interest.”
– Mark Coley, Joint General Practitioners’ IT Committee
“The team at OpenSAFELY demonstrates an approach to sensitive health data research that puts patients and the public’s expectations at the heart of its work. It has gone far above the threshold of compliance to show what a trustworthy research environment can be, from its development and use of synthetic data, public logs and reusable tools, to its patient panel and explainer video. I am looking forward to seeing how its use extends beyond COVID-19 and paves the way for future health data research.”
– Nicola Hamilton, Understanding Patient Data
“I think the important thing is that it enables us to answer research questions that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to answer before. In a way, that means that the people whose data we’re working on, which is all of our health data, actually can trust the system. Because trust is the core element at the heart of all of this. If we’re going to transform NHS services and understand the health and care sector in the depth that we’re going to need that, we need to be able to answer data questions at scale. […] The data is never leaving the NHS. It is never disclosed at an individual patient level in any part of the process that he’s outlined. The code goes to the data rather than the data going to the researchers. And that provides the element of trust that is needed, I think, to transform our ability to do large-scale population-based data work.”
– Prof Charlotte Summers, Director, The Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Heart & Lung Research Institute at the University of Cambridge; in BBC Radio 4 interview, 20 Feb 2025
“OpenSAFELY gets us 80% to 90% of the way to the Government’s objectives. Operated under rigorous access controls, it could give the vast majority of the research benefit with very little risk to the security of the data.”
– David Davis MP, addressing the House of Commons on 24 June 2021
“During the pandemic, the [OpenSAFELY] project was absolutely fundamental to our response. In fact, it existed before the pandemic, but really came into its own during the pandemic. For instance, it was the first project to find underlying risk factors for COVID-19. OpenSAFELY was the first project around the world to find statistically and significantly that obesity makes it more likely that someone will die of COVID. That was an important fact, discovered through this project and without disclosing anybody’s body mass index in doing so.”
– Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, responding to David Davis in the same Commons debate on 24 June 2021
“[OpenSAFELY] provides access to GP data not by taking it and sending it off somewhere else but by having infrastructure in the data centres of the main GP record providers so that researchers can access that data securely. We should be making more use of services such as that, having built them.”
– Lord Allan of Hallam, addressing the House of Lords debate on NHS performance and innovation, 15 June 2023
“Countless lives have been saved through the pandemic after health data enabled ground-breaking research. As we move forwards, millions of patients could benefit from the more efficient use of health data through boosting innovation and ensuring the NHS can continue to offer cutting-edge care, saving lives. I want to thank Professor Ben Goldacre, his team, and all those who contributed to this review – this work, alongside our upcoming data strategy, will help to transform the NHS on our road to recovery.”
– Sajid Javid, on the publication of The Goldacre Review
“We’ve been talking a lot with this new government about what is the new data infrastructure that we need across the country to support growth and better research, and I think OpenSAFELY sits right in the centre of that.”
– Ming Tang, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, NHS England
“I’m a late joiner to the OpenSAFELY club, but it seems to be one of the best clubs to be in.”
– David Clark, National Clinical Advisor to the NHS Talking Therapies programme
“What is the value of a trusted research environment like OpenSAFELY? They deliver quality, diversity and integrity. There’s data sharing, with code sharing built in. It’s mandated. What could be better than that? It solves the problem of sharing routinely collected observational data. […] This is an exercise in transparency and trust in medical science, and I want to thank you and everybody involved for what you’re doing. You get into our publications because this is credible science, done in a timely manner, on important topics. “
– Kamran Abbasi, editor of the BMJ
“The OpenSAFELY programme, created in 2020, has built an extraordinary platform that integrates general practice data from across the country. Yet its enormous potential to transform care is largely untapped. “
– Lord Darzi, The Darzi Review 2024
“I’ve been using GP data for research since 1999. These NHS records are incredibly powerful, but for decades they have been hard to access securely at scale. In OpenSAFELY, finally, there is a platform that enables access, at national scale, with clinical information flowing in near-real-time, while maintaining data security and patient privacy.”
– Liam Smeeth, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
“OpenSAFELY has been a breakthrough in how we responsibly use the UK’s health data for public good. By bringing together expertise in software engineering, epidemiology and a deep knowledge of the UK health system, the team has delivered products and services being used by hundreds of researchers to understand how to improve human health. Wellcome is proud to be a long-term supporter of the OpenSAFELY team. They continue to demonstrate how to encode trust into technology and policy, and deliver useful technology that encourages transparency and open working by design.”
– Tariq Khokhar, Wellcome
“We enjoyed working with OpenSAFELY. It’s actually not as hard to pick up as you might think. There’s a proactive team behind it, and a supportive community around it. That makes writing code easier, especially when you’re actively encouraged to reuse code that’s already been written. No other platform comes close in terms of data coverage, privacy and safety.”
– Dr Mark Russell, King’s College London
“I’m a data scientist so I felt comfortable writing code, but things were made easier because there was already so much existing code for key steps in the analysis. I could take code that someone had written to ask one question, and repurpose it to ask another. When I got stuck with anything, the Bennett team was on hand with support – a quick ten-minute call and job done, we could move on. I couldn’t believe how fast it was – I started in January 2022 and had a paper online by June. That’s unreal in my experience.”
– Dr Ed Parker, Assistant Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
“OpenSAFELY allowed us to evaluate a large-scale public health intervention in real time, while it was actually being used. We were able to deliver gold-standard randomised control trial results in a short enough time frame to inform current practice – in a fraction of the expected time, at a fraction of the expected cost, and with far fewer people working on it than expected.”
– Ben Ainsworth, Associate Professor, Digital Intervention Group, University of Southampton
“The data held by the NHS is globally unique and as we saw during the pandemic, this approach enables researchers to benefit from that valuable resource, whilst keeping the data secure, safe and private. Expanding this service will unlock the power of patient data to help drive life-saving treatment breakthroughs to help people with a range of conditions and illnesses.”
– Dr Vin Diwakar, NHS National Medical Director for Transformation (NHS press release)
“Our NHS is at the forefront of life-saving medical research, and services like this will help drive future breakthroughs that deliver the best outcomes for patients. It played a vital role during the pandemic, helping us to identify which people were most at risk of the virus and determine the effectiveness of vaccines. I am determined that we now build on this progress. By using patient data while protecting their privacy, we will be able to support people with a range of conditions including cancer, diabetes and asthma – encouraging innovation and life-saving research.”
– Victoria Atkins, Health and Social Care Secretary
“As a clinician who has worked with Electronic Health Record data for many years, it has been frustrating to see that the potential of NHS patient data to improve care and health service delivery has been largely untapped. OpenSAFELY is a transformative approach to patient data, enabling rapid, large-scale research to provide answers to critically important research questions, while protecting patient privacy. I am absolutely delighted that it has become part of the national infrastructure for the secure use of patient records to improve healthcare.”
– Professor Laurie Tomlinson, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine