Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

16 Sep 2021

Oxford announces the founding of the new Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

The Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford has been established to pioneer the better use of data, evidence and digital tools in healthcare and policy, optimizing the impact of interventions to achieve improved outcomes.

5 Aug 2021

OpenSAFELY co-pilot programme: assisting users on their OpenSAFELY journey

All new users of the OpenSAFELY platform get access to our supportive co-pilot programme, where each new OpenSAFELY user is assigned a member of the OpenSAFELY team as their co-pilot for the duration of their project.

5 Jul 2021

OpenSAFELY: Public Opinion

This week sees the publication of an independent Citizens’ Jury commissioned for NHSx and the National Data Guardian which found that OpenSAFELY was by far the most strongly and consistently supported of all NHS COVID data projects examined.

7 May 2021

OpenSAFELY: The Origin Story

On our first anniversary, from the Policy Lead in the Bennett Institute, this is the brief story of the positive side from all our lives: how OpenSAFELY came to life, and what we’ve achieved so far.

26 Mar 2021

OpenPrescribing March Newsletter

Our latest newsletter including information on: new job roles, hospital only measure, total oral morphine equivalence measures, OpenPrescribing and Bennett Institute Papers.

16 Feb 2021

Citing and Crediting Codelists: A discussion for the research community

This is a draft discussion paper, the first of a series exploring “open team science” approaches to managing health data, and specifically how to create a collaborative computational data science ecosystem where the sharing and re-use of objects such as codelists and code is facilitated, encouraged, recognised, and rewarded. As a microcosm of this we have first explored “codelists”. There are currently no ‘answers’ or preferred solutions given. We will be holding an open discussion with the research community on 2nd March at 3pm - you can book to join us here.

3 Dec 2020

OpenPrescribing Newsletter November 2020

We have been very busy since our last newsletter back in July and there are tonnes of exciting updates for you here! Measure Update: Total Oral Morphine Equivalence The Faculty of Pain Medicine has recently updated their recommendation on oral morphine equivalence (OME) which we use on our OpenPrescribing measure of OME. We have taken this opportunity to update and a new novel implementation of how we assess OME. Until this work is completed we have taken the decision to “suspend” the measure from dashboards however you can still view the old method using this link.

24 Nov 2020

Biologic Medicines for Severe Asthma

Victory! We have the hospital medicines data. Now: biologic medicines for severe Asthma In July, Ben and Brian wrote a piece in the British Medical Journal arguing that hospital medicines data should be openly shared. Magnificently, the NHS has now made secondary care medicines data (SCMD) available. You can read the full technical specification of the data here but briefly: it is hospital pharmacy stock control data, which is collected and processed by Rx-Info, and is now published on the NHS Business Services Authority website in the NHS dm+d standard we know, love, and have documented well.

7 Oct 2020

OpenPathology

This is the code related to our OpenPathology project. Specifically this repo stores ad-hoc analyses, papers, and related research. The code for the website (and online tool, when developed) are in their own repository.