OpenSAFELY: The Origin Story

Over 42 days during the peak of the first wave of COVID-19 this team worked day and night to produce a fully open-source, privacy-preserving software platform, capable of running open and reproducible analytics across electronic health records, all held securely in situ. Since then the OpenSAFELY platform has expanded to a full scale analytic environment for secure data analysis, reproducible data curation, federated analysis, and code sharing, with every line of code for the platform, for data management, and for data analysis all shared openly by default, in re-usable forms, automatically, and without exception.