GPs will soon be instructed to make anonymous patient data available to a ‘secure’ data sharing platform as it expands to cover non-Covid research.
NHS England wrote to GP practices last week about the expansion of the OpenSAFELY research platform, which it approved earlier this year.
OpenSAFELY, developed by the University of Oxford, was used by researchers during the pandemic to analyse anonymised data from GP records and help identify new Covid-19 treatments.
Health secretary Wes Streeting is expected to issue directions to NHS England ‘in the coming weeks’ to enable the legal expansion of the platform to other diseases.
After this, NHSE will issue a ‘Data Provision Notice (DPN)’ to all GP practices which will require them to ‘make pseudonymised data available to the OpenSAFELY platform’.
‘This DPN will be mandatory and practices will need to formally instruct your chosen GP system supplier to make data available to the OpenSAFELY service,’ NHSE said in its primary care bulletin last week.
The BMA’s GP Committee England has supported this move, saying it has ‘long advocated’ for using the research platform ‘more widely’.
In a communication to GPs on Friday, the committee said: ‘The joint GP IT committee with input from the BMA and RCGP supports OpenSAFELY, as the team led by Professor Ben Goldacre have managed to develop robust methods for privacy and transparency which protect GPs as data controllers for the GP record.’
The committee highlighted that OpenSAFELY does not ‘interact directly’ with patient records, and the pseudonymised data remains within the GP record.
All analyses are run remotely through the OpenSAFELY platform and only ‘aggregate information’ leaves the platform.
On the upcoming Data Provision Notice, the BMA told GPs: ‘There will be a follow-up email from NHS England about the direction in a couple of weeks, which is the point when you will be asked to press a button to acknowledge receipt and we will communicate more with you at this stage about the next steps which will need to be taken.’
In February, Pulse reported that NHS England had shared draft documents with GP IT representatives to extend the legal basis of OpenSAFELY to make it a ‘general purpose resource’ for academic research.
The platform also recently received £7m of funding to launch a new research project into talking therapy outcomes using GP data, which can go ahead once the new legal directions are issued.
So far, the platform has enabled 181 research projects into a variety of Covid-related issues, including the demographics of those who get the virus and the efficacy of treatments.
In October, the Government announced plans to make it easier for patient records to be used for research, by taking over responsibility for sharing data where patients have consented for it to be used in studies.
Health ministers have also pushed for a ‘single patient record’ in the NHS, with the Government pledging last year to introduce new laws to make patient data available across all NHS trusts and GP practices.
