OPCRD-NEXUS Coming Soon
OPC is building a secure platform called OPCRD-NEXUS, which securely stores de-identified primary care patient data from OPCRD that is linked to secondary care patient data, such as Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data. The platform will provide hospital data for practices in England sourced from NHS Digital. We have completed initial validation work and expect the platform to be up and running in early 2025.
Why We Need Linked Patient Data
To carry out comprehensive research, patient data needs to be analysed across various healthcare settings: from primary care through to secondary care (hospitals) and disease registries. Linking primary care data from GP practices to other health data enables us to provide a fuller picture of patient care records to support vital public health, medical and scientific research, including Covid-19 research. This helps bring about advances in science and patient care.
Optimum Patient Care (OPC)
Optimum Patient Care is a UK social enterprise that has been providing free quality improvement programmes for GP practices since 2005. OPC also supports practices to take part in ethics-approved research. OPC maintains and manages the Optimum Patient Care Research Database (OPCRD), which provides de-identified patient data for ethics-approved scientific and medical research. OPCRD has NHS Research Ethics Committee approval to provide anonymised patient data for research.