OpenSAFELY Wins CogX Award for Open Science Innovation, 2023, Nick DeVito

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CRG

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
OpenSAFELY Wins CogX Award for Open Science Innovation

Nick DeVito

We’re delighted to announce that the OpenSAFELY Collaborative has won a prestigious CogX Award for the Best Innovation in Open Source Technology! This award celebrates “revolutionary new releases of an existing suite of open source tools, or completely novel approaches to the open source ecosystem.” The Bennett Institute was represented at the ceremony by Brian MacKenna.

More at link: https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2023/09/opensafely-wins-cogx-award-for-open-science-innovation/
 
OpenSAFELY is a hugely productive open source data analysis platform built in collaboration between academics, electronic health record (EHR) system vendors, and NHS England. EHR data is commonly used in research. It presents huge opportunities, but also challenges around privacy, efficiency and reproducibility.
The OpenSAFELY platform is a new Trusted Research Environment developed during the pandemic. It is particularly known for its innovative methods to protect patients’ privacy while providing access to 58 million patients’ full GP EHR data.
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OpenSAFELY was also designed from the outset to impose best practice around open, reproducible code on all users, as an easy default. Researchers commit, as a condition of access, to share all analysis code: but openness is also an automatic feature of the platform. Code can only run against patient data via a GitHub repository: so it must first be posted on GitHub before it can be executed.

All code run is publicly logged and accessible by anyone for scientific review, adaptation, and efficient re-use. This uses open code to build trust from professionals and the public; additionally, it means all users can see all previous users’ code; and any “p-hacking” (or multiple analyses for “cherry picked” analyses) would be immediately detectable.
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Sounds fantastic, what a great resource
 
There is the critical and longstanding issue of how accurate and comprehensive the medical records are, i.e. GIGO.

But in principle it has serious potential, on efficiency grounds alone.
 
Sean said:
There is the critical and longstanding issue of how accurate and comprehensive the medical records are, i.e. GIGO.

But in principle it has serious potential, on efficiency grounds alone.
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Yeah, medical records are extremely GIGO. I'll give you my favorite example. A neurologist said I might have a certain genetic disorder, and to see a geneticist. I asked my PCP for a referral for a geneticist, to see if I had this condition. They gave me a referral and then put it on my chart as a diagnosis!
 
@CRG, do you have any contact with the people involved, or any idea about the cost of applying this technology to large health data sources?
 
Hutan said:
@CRG, do you have any contact with the people involved, or any idea about the cost of applying this technology to large health data sources?
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Sorry no. I can't even recall which Twitter follow I picked up the link from. However it seems Ben Goldacre is part of the team behind it:
 
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