OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients

Abstract Background Establishing who is at risk from a novel rapidly arising cause of death, and why, requires a new approach to epidemiological research with very large datasets and timely data. Working on behalf of NHS England we therefore set out to deliver a secure and pseudonymised analytics platform inside the data centre of a major primary care electronic health records vendor establishing coverage across detailed primary care records for a substantial proportion of all patients in England. The following results are preliminary. Data sources Primary care electronic health records managed by the electronic health record vendor TPP, pseudonymously linked to patient-level data from the COVID-19 Patient…