Platform news

This page lists significant improvements to the platform and other important updates since June 2021, with the most recent at the top. We suggest you check it regularly.

Last updated: 07 September 2022

Add rounding instructions to disclosure documentations

Updated: 07 September 2022

Added instructions regarding rounding to our disclosure control documentation, including an example.


Added support for parameterised study definitions

Updated: 07 September 2022

Study definitions can now be “parameterised” so they accept values passed in by the action. This allows multiple cohorts with different properties to be generated by a single study definition.


Added support for querying by first and last day of the school year

Updated: 06 September 2022

Added support for querying by first and last day of the (English) school year.


Added resources management argument to opensafely run command

Updated: 31 August 2022

Users of the OpenSAFELY platform use the opensafely tool to run their code locally prior to running against the real data.

This change adds some options to control the concurrency and memory usage of running actions, which should help users manage their local resource usage.


Added with_at_least_one_day_in_critical_care filter to admitted_to_hospital

Updated: 10 August 2022

Added ability to filter a patient’s hospital admissions to only those with at least one day in critical care.


Platform status page

Updated: 02 August 2022

We have rolled out a status page for the platform. Services on this page will be automatically updated if incidents occur.

Clarification about referrals data

Updated: 29 June 2022

We have clarified in the documentation that data on referrals is incomplete. Any codelists which include referral codes used with patients.with_these_clinical_events are unlikely to return complete data as it is largely held separately in a difficult-to-analyse format. We hope to offer an alternative data source for referrals in due course.


Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccination name change

Updated: 17 June 2022

The name of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has changed to COVID-19 Vaccine Vaxzevria 0.5ml inj multidose vials (AstraZeneca). To continue to access data for these vaccines, all users will need to update study definitions appropriately.


UK Renal Registry added to OpenSAFELY

Updated: 21 April 2022

Added support for querying the UK Renal Registry


ONS CIS added to OpenSAFELY

Updated: 05 April 2022

Added support for querying COVID-19 Infection Survey data provided by the Office for National Statistics.


Additional options for admitted_to_hospital

Updated: 08 March 2022

Added support for returning total_bed_days_in_period and total_critical_care_days_in_period from admitted_to_hospital.


ISARIC added to OpenSAFELY

Updated: 07 February 2022

Added support for querying the ISARIC (International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium) dataset.


COVID-19 Therapeutics added to OpenSAFELY

Updated: 02 February 2022

Added support for querying the COVID-19 Therapeutics dataset.


Added ability to query a patient’s place_of_death

Updated: 28 January 2022

Added ability to query a patient’s place_of_death (TPP backend only).


Extended mean_recorded_value, added min_recorded_value and max_recorded_value

Updated: 27 January 2022


Added support for querying by first and last day of the NHS financial (recording) year

Updated: 24 January 2022

Added support for querying by first and last day of the NHS financial (recording) year.


Show how to extract cohortextractor output in compressed gzip (csv.gz) format

Updated: 06 September 2021

Show how to extract cohortextractor output in compressed gzip (csv.gz) format - recommended to be used in all studies to minimise file storage size. (However, CSVs can still be used where Stata is used for analysis).

This is now shown in all parts of documentation with cohortextractor steps.


Added support for users to provide their own dummy data

Updated: 21 July 2021

Added support for users to provide their own dummy data.


Documentation explaining how permissions work

Updated: 07 July 2021

Added a page in the docs explaining (briefly) how permissions work.


Ability to query a patient’s health care worker status in vaccination records

Updated: 11 June 2021

Add ability to query a patient’s health care worker status in vaccination records (TPP backend only)


OpenSAFELY CLI can now start a JupyterLab server

Updated: 18 January 2021

The OpenSAFELY command-line tool can now start a JupyterLab server. This allows you to easily develop code within the OpenSAFELY Python environment.


Added support for case-control studies

Updated: 14 January 2021

Added support for case-control studies


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