OpenSAFELY: A platform for analysing electronic health records designed for reproducible research

Electronic health records (EHRs) and other administrative health data are increasingly used in research to generate evidence on the effectiveness, safety, and utilisation of medical products and services, and to inform public health guidance and policy. Reproducibility is a fundamental step for rese...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety Vol. 33; no. 6; pp. e5815 - n/a
Main Authors: Nab, Linda, Schaffer, Andrea L., Hulme, William, DeVito, Nicholas J., Dillingham, Iain, Wiedemann, Milan, Andrews, Colm D., Curtis, Helen, Fisher, Louis, Green, Amelia, Massey, Jon, Walters, Caroline E., Higgins, Rose, Cunningham, Christine, Morley, Jessica, Mehrkar, Amir, Hart, Liam, Davy, Simon, Evans, David, Hickman, George, Inglesby, Peter, Morton, Caroline E., Smith, Rebecca M., Ward, Tom, O'Dwyer, Thomas, Maude, Steven, Bridges, Lucy, Butler‐Cole, Ben F. C., Stables, Catherine L., Stokes, Pete, Bates, Chris, Cockburn, Jonny, Hester, Frank, Parry, John, Bhaskaran, Krishnan, Schultze, Anna, Rentsch, Christopher T., Mathur, Rohini, Tomlinson, Laurie A., Williamson, Elizabeth J., Smeeth, Liam, Walker, Alex, Bacon, Sebastian, MacKenna, Brian, Goldacre, Ben
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01.06.2024
Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
Subjects:
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
Electronic Health Records
Electronic medical records
Humans
Medical equipment
open science
OpenSAFELY
Public health
Reproducibility
Reproducibility of Results
Research Design
research platform
Software
OpenSAFELY
open science
electronic health records
reproducibility
research platform
ISSN:1053-8569, 1099-1557, 1099-1557
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Electronic health records (EHRs) and other administrative health data are increasingly used in research to generate evidence on the effectiveness, safety, and utilisation of medical products and services, and to inform public health guidance and policy. Reproducibility is a fundamental step for research credibility and promotes trust in evidence generated from EHRs. At present, ensuring research using EHRs is reproducible can be challenging for researchers. Research software platforms can provide technical solutions to enhance the reproducibility of research conducted using EHRs. In response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, we developed the secure, transparent, analytic open‐source software platform OpenSAFELY designed with reproducible research in mind. OpenSAFELY mitigates common barriers to reproducible research by: standardising key workflows around data preparation; removing barriers to code‐sharing in secure analysis environments; enforcing public sharing of programming code and codelists; ensuring the same computational environment is used everywhere; integrating new and existing tools that encourage and enable the use of reproducible working practices; and providing an audit trail for all code that is run against the real data to increase transparency. This paper describes OpenSAFELY's reproducibility‐by‐design approach in detail.
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ISSN:1053-8569
1099-1557
1099-1557
DOI:10.1002/pds.5815