What happens when you apply the OpenSAFELY model from NHS GP data to schools? 🍎✏️ We found several key differences, but the core principles of secure, reproducible analysis carry over. Learn more: bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/05/what-we-learned-when-we-took-opensafely-from-gp-data-to-schools-data/

3 days left until Professor Seb Bacon's inaugural lecture! ⌛ 🧑‍🏫 Lecture from 17:00-18:00 🥂✨ Drinks and canapés from 18:00-19:00 📍 Magdalen College, Grove Auditorium, Oxford OX1 4AU.   Register now to secure your place:

🚀 OpenSAFELY was recently named in the Covid-19 Inquiry for helping shape the UK’s vaccine infrastructure during the pandemic. 🔗 bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/05/essential-infrastructure-how-opensafely-revolutionised-health-data-analysis-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ @ukcovid-19inquiry.bsky.social

Inaugural Lecture Klaxon! Our magnificent CTO Seb Bacon is a hero of the modern age, and now PROFESSOR Seb Bacon... Come to his inaugural lecture in Oxford! OpenSAFELY! OpenPrescribing! TrialsTracker! OpenCorporates! Open Code! Open Everything! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/05... bacon.boutique

Can healthcare systems implement AI equitably? 🤔 At last week's Human Welfare Conference, DPhil candidate & pharmacist Kareem Mohamed chaired a panel on AI, equity & implementation. The main takeaway? As AI reshapes healthcare, equity must remain at the centre of every conversation.

Seb Bacon has been made the first-ever Professor of Practice in Research Software Engineering at NDPCHS! 🧑‍🏫Join his inaugural lecture from 17:00-19:00 📍 Magdalen College, Grove Auditorium, Oxford OX1 4AU. Register now: lnkd.in/ekiBF5jD @bacon.boutique @oxprimarycare.bsky.social

NHS Talking Therapies supported over 670,000 people with depression & anxiety in England last year. Thanks to grants from @wellcometrust.bsky.social, we’ll be able to analyse this dataset in OpenSAFELY and learn more about mental health treatment in England. Learn more: lnkd.in/enC5ebTR

A BMI of 200. A pregnancy recorded for someone over 80. Missing ethnicity data for 1 in 5 patients. @andreaschaffer.bsky.social explains why robust data checks and cleaning make analysis more credible, reproducible, and ultimately more useful. Read more: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/05...

GP records hold 34M migration-related codes — but they capture some migrants far more reliably than others. In BJGP Open, Yamina Boukari and colleagues used OpenCodeCounts to study how migration was coded in English primary care from 2011–2025. Learn more: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/04...

🏥 We’ve updated OpenPrescribing Hospitals, our platform for analysing NHS trust medicines data in England. Our new way to view measures will be key to helping users quickly find insights and act on them. Learn more: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/04...

📖 Great to see OpenSAFELY featured in Significance magazine last week! “Diving into the health data goldmine” highlights how OpenSAFELY enables secure, large-scale analysis of NHS data while protecting patient privacy. Read more: academic.oup.com/jrssig/artic... @significancemag.bsky.social

🚨Deadline approaching: OpenSAFELY non-COVID-19 research applications closing in 10 days! 👉 If you’re a researcher or analyst planning to apply, make sure to submit your application by Thursday 30 April at 17:00 using this link: www.opensafely.org/opensafely-is-open-for-submissions/

We were delighted to welcome alumni, students and academics to our Alumni Retreat 2026 at @hmcoxford.bsky.social Celebrating our global community while exploring AI & digital healthcare, the event showcased the impact, insight and leadership of our alumni network. Read more: https://bit.ly/4sIUvGr

Bridging the gap between ICD-10 and SNOMED CT is key to unlocking better health data. Our new tool makes mapping easier, more transparent, and scalable — helping researchers get more from clinical data. 👉Learn more: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/04/icd-10-to-snomed-ct-mapping-tool/

🧠📊Bennett’s CTO @bacon.boutique and Resident Pharmacist @brianmackenna.bsky.social joined the Alumni Retreat: AI & Digital Healthcare Systems to discuss how big data is transforming healthcare operations and improving lives. Learn more: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/about-us/ @oxprimarycare.bsky.social

New OpenSAFELY paper 👇

🚨 OpenSAFELY Milestone Paper! How did the pandemic affect diagnosis rates for chronic diseases? We analysed rates for 19 long-term conditions in 30m people in England. The results are out this week in @bmj.com 📄 Read here: doi.org/10.1136/bmj-...

Live from Oxford with Professor Ben Goldacre — Bad Pharma, Good Data, Better Care We take the stage at the @bennettoxford.bsky.social with its Director, @bengoldacre.bsky.social, for a conversation on evidence, transparency, and why better data is the starting point—not the end point—of better care

That brings the 2025 Bennett Institute Medicines Symposium to a close. A big thank you to everyone who joined us. It has been a fantastic two days and we look forward to continuing this work with you.

Morning Oxford. We will be kicking off day 2 with a demo of our tools. OpenSAFELY, OpenPrescribing, OpenPrescribing Hospitals, OpenCodelists and OpenCodeCounts.

Congratulations to all of the winners of the Bennett Prize in OpenPrescribing. You can read more on our LinkedIn and we will be sharing more on our blog over the coming days. www.linkedin.com/posts/bennet...

Great start with a deep look at prescribing data.

Good morning Oxford. Ready for Day 1 of the Bennett Institute Medicines Symposium.

Tomorrow: sold-out Bennett Symposium at Jesus College www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2025-.... Day 1 = presentations and panels. Day 2 = collaborative sessions and drop-ins with OpenPrescribing & OpenSAFELY teams. If you're attending, see you there 📊

We are hiring researchers! We’re looking for Epidemiologists / Health Data Scientists to join our growing research team at the Bennett Institute. Please check out the job advert and tell your friends! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/09...

The mighty @bmjmedicine.bsky.social have joined Bluesky! Follow them! It reminded me of our first paper there - PINCER medication safety indicators using OpenSAFELY doi.org/10.1136/bmjm... Short thread to remind everyone else!

📢Competition time! We are launching the Bennett Prize in OpenPrescribing to celebrate the best user-led projects! Have you improved safety, saved money or improved prescribing in your organisation using OpenPrescribing? Enter now! Find out more here 👇 www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/08...

We are launching a project on improving code sharing in health and medical research funded by @ukri.org and working with @floriannaudet.bsky.social and @bmj.com Read more here: bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/08/help-us-improve-code-sharing-in-health-research/

💊 New research from @bennettoxford.bsky.social finds wide variation in how long repeat prescriptions last across England, with durations ranging from 28 to 84 days depending on region, practice & software. Longer prescriptions could save time for patients & the NHS 👩‍⚕️

Save the date: 10-11 December 2025 We'll be hosting a symposium on medicines, NHS data, and open research. Here's more info, and a chance to sign up for updates: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2025-...

We tried to do some formulary review work for a tiny sub-set of info about antidepressants in an undergrad project back in 2022. Just trying to map which were the live formularies and which one applied to different geographic regions was very hard (thanks to repeated NHS reorganisations) (1/2)

We had some thoughts about formularies

Lots going on

And in other news

We shared our OpenPrescribing Hospitals beta with the folks at the Clinical Pharmacy Congress, and the response was very positive! Here's a short post from @brianmackenna.bsky.social with more info - www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/06...

Our first #WorldImmunizationWeek podcast episode is live now! Tune in to hear from @emprestige.bsky.social about their journey from MSc to PhD @lshtm.bsky.social. They also share insider tips on the best lunch spots in central London, so don't miss this. soundcloud.com/user-7893872...

We're hiring an OpenSAFELY product manager. Come and join us, we're a nice bunch. www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/04...

We're adding hospital prescribing data to our hugely popular openprescribing data platform. So... What does NHS hospital prescribing data look like? As ever, our team culture is to build, but also to document, all in the open. Here is a deep deep dive... www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/03...

How often do you go to the doctor for your regular prescription? Every month? Every two months? Twice a year? Once a year? We ran the numbers. New paper out in @bjgp.bsky.social 👇 doi.org/10.3399/BJGP...

OpenPrescribing for Hospitals Live! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/03...

Great BBC news story about new developments at OpenSAFELY, securely provisioning GP data to researchers with innovative methods to protect all patients' privacy, and building out to support mental health research at scale. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm delighted to say our highly secure and productive OpenSAFELY platform has received a further £17 million in funding from Wellcome, including for a new mental health data project. More here, and clips from Today on Radio4 this morning too! www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/02...

We were on the Today Programme this morning! Here's a blog post from Ben about why OpenSAFELY is in the news today, and how a total of £17 million of new funding from Wellcome is going to be a game-changer: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/02...

We've started work on a new service, OpenPrescribing Hospitals - using existing hospital medicines data to help optimise prescribing in hospitals in the future. Here's a sneak peek of what's coming, and some useful background context: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/01... #OpenPrescribing

You too could read our OpenSAFELY book while eating snacks. We still have a few copies to give away! Here's how to get one: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/01... #OpenSAFELY

We’re publishing our printed book, “The past, present and future of OpenSAFELY” as a series of blog posts. But we also have some copies of the book itself to give away, for free! The first blog post in the series tells you how to get a copy: www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2025/01... #OpenSAFELY

We are hiring a tech lead! We build high impact national health data infrastructure that is open, productive, and beautiful - like our OpenSAFELY - in a truly mixed team, where software developers and researchers all share skills, status, knowledge, and best practice! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

The Causal Inference in #IDEpi Workshop provided great insight and discussion thanks to input from various speakers! @wjchulme.bsky.social of @bennettoxford.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk introduced us to challenges in estimating vaccine effectiveness in routine data #OpenSAFELY (1/3)

For those of you who couldn't come to our OpenSAFELY Community Symposium - now you can catch up on the whole thing www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2024/12...

People don't realise how significant this project is. It solves many of the major technical, ethical and research challenges of using EHR data for research. This approach should be much more widely adopted for making use of all the data we collect (at great expense!) in healthcare.