OpenSAFELY Data Analytics Service Data Provision Notice
This Data Provision Notice to require GP practices to provide the service with access to pseudonymised GP patient data to enable clinical audit, service evaluation, health surveillance, research and health and social care policy, planning and commissioning purposes, and public health purposes.
Overview
Learning from the OpenSAFELY COVID-19 Service (the COVID-19 Service), an additional service has been developed and will be tested on a pilot basis to enable GP and NHS England pseudonymised patient data to be accessed through the OpenSAFELY platform for further secondary uses purposes.
The OpenSAFELY Data Analytics service provides a secure analytics service for users approved by or on behalf of NHS England to run queries on GP and NHS England pseudonymised patient data for non-COVID-19 specified secondary uses.
The service, and the purpose of running the queries and obtaining the aggregate outputs is limited to the following purposes:
- clinical audit [1]
- service evaluation [2]
- health surveillance [3]
- research [4]
- health and social care policy, planning and commissioning purposes and public health purposes, where agreed on a project specific basis by or on behalf of:
- the Deputy Director of Data Policy on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care, and
- the Chief Data & Analytics Officer on behalf of NHS England, and
- a nominated representative of each of the Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Medical Association on behalf of the Joint GP IT Committee
- evaluation of the service
[1,2,3] As defined in NHS Health Research Authority's Defining Research table (opens in PDF)
[4] As defined in paragraph 3.1 of the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research
Scope
All general practices across England using TPP and Optum (formerly EMIS Group PLC) health record systems.
Period
The service will be delivered under the OpenSAFELY Data Analytics Directions 2025 until 31 March 2027.
Last edited: 1 July 2025 11:08 am