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About OpenSAFELY Interactive

What is OpenSAFELY Interactive?

OpenSAFELY Interactive is part of the OpenSAFELY project. It allows certain OpenSAFELY analyses to be performed via a no code environment, while maintaining the security and transparency upon which OpenSAFELY is built.

Who can use OpenSAFELY Interactive?

OpenSAFELY Interactive is under active development, currently in an early pilot phase, and undergoing initial user testing in a limited group of approved NHS users. A wider user group will be able to use OpenSAFELY Interactive in due course. If you are interested in using this tool once it is more widely available please register your interest.

What does OpenSAFELY Interactive do?

OpenSAFELY Interactive allows approved users, working on approved projects, to conduct analyses via the OpenSAFELY platform without the need to write code. Analyses are requested via a simple form and the tool automatically runs to corresponding analysis and produces a report.

What does an OpenSAFELY Interactive analysis output contain?

In the current pilot phase, analyses will return a series of time trend charts for a clinical area of interest over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, showing:

  • Population-level rates
  • Population-level rates split by a variety of demographic groupings (sex, age, ethnicity, index of multiple deprivation and/or region - depending on which options were selected)
  • Practice-level rates and variation using decile charts

Reports also display overall summary statistics (total events, number of distinct patients affected, events in the latest month/week) and which five codes in the codelist were most commonly used, with percentages.

How does OpenSAFELY Interactive work?

After logging in, users select their codelists of interest and reporting options and submit a request. An analysis script is automatically created, from a template, to perform the requested analysis. This script is submitted to the secure datacentre where it extracts data for the selected codelists and analyses it to produce summary data and charts.

Following review by our trained output checking team, the summary data and charts are released from the secure datacentre. A report is built from the released data, and the requester receives an email containing a link to the report.