Oxford University’s OpenSAFELY team wins Queen Elizabeth Prize for Higher and Further Education

Oxford University’s OpenSAFELY team has been awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for its work on protecting NHS patient data, while unlocking life-saving health insights. 

The Queen Elizabeth Prizes are awarded every two years and are the highest available honor in the UK in further and higher education.

Sir Damon Buffini, Chair of the Royal Anniversary Trust, says: 'The Queen Elizabeth Prizes for Higher and Further Education celebrate the power of education to change the world for the better. This much-loved national honour recognises, at the highest level of state, outstanding work in UK universities and colleges, and the remarkable benefit they bring to our economy, society and the wider world.'

OpenSAFELY was created during the Covid-19 pandemic, creating a new method for assessing whole-population NHS GP data, while protecting patient privacy more robustly.

Rather than moving large datasets between researchers, the OpenSAFELY method provides dummy data for the development of analysis. Researchers must then submit their analyses for automated execution against real patient records, without the need to move data or interact directly with sensitive records. The system has been used by dozens of organizations on more than 200 projects. 

Professor Ben Goldacre, Director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, adds: 'Patient data can supercharge research, but it must be treated with huge respect: those medical records contain, by definition, the most confidential medical secrets of every citizen in the country. Our work has shown that you can have data access and patient privacy, safely unlocking data access to improve healthcare for all, if platforms are designed with innovative privacy-preserving methods at their core. OpenSAFELY is also a public asset: all our code is given away for free, so that everyone can see it, understand it, and re-use it.

“OpenSAFELY is a huge collaboration, across many organisations and sectors including our team, the electronic health record vendors TPP and EMIS, patient and professional groups, our hugely productive researchers and users, and NHS England. We are honoured to have won this prize, and we hope that more users will come to tap the power in this confidential patient data through secure means.”