Privacy-First Research with OpenSAFELY • Eli Holderness & Hannes Lowette

GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

This interview was recorded for GOTO Unscripted.
https://gotopia.tech

Read the full transcription of this interview here

Eli Holderness - Research Software Advocate at Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, Speaker & Professional Nerd
Hannes Lowette - Principal Consultant at Axxes, Monolith Advocate, Speaker & Whiskey Lover
RESOURCES
Eli
https://bsky.app/profile/eli.holderness.dev
https://twitter.com/eliholderness
https://hachyderm.io/@eli
https://linkedin.com/in/eli-holderness-4890b886
https://github.com/eli-miriam
https://eli.holderness.dev

Hannes
https://bsky.app/profile/hanneslowette.net
https://twitter.com/hannes_lowette
https://github.com/Belenar
https://linkedin.com/in/hanneslowette

Links
https://www.opensafely.org
https://docs.opensafely.org/ehrql
https://github.com/opensafely-core/ehrql

DESCRIPTION
OpenSAFELY represents a revolutionary approach to medical research that prioritizes patient privacy while enabling valuable insights from healthcare data. Rather than giving researchers direct access to sensitive GP records, it allows them to submit code that runs in a secure environment, with only privacy-checked aggregated results returned.
Hannes Lowette talks to Eli Holderness about how the system works, its benefits for ensuring reproducible science, the challenges of working with data not collected for research purposes, and its potential applications beyond healthcare. The approach balances the need for medical research with strict privacy protections, ensuring patients maintain trust in how their sensitive data is used.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ben Goldacre • Bad Science
Ben Goldacre • Bad Pharma
Aaron Parecki • OAuth 2.0 Simplified

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فصول

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. How OpenSAFELY protects GP data (00:01:24)

3. [Ad] Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast (00:14:09)

4. (Cont.) How OpenSAFELY protects GP data (00:14:44)

5. Ensuring secure, scalable medical research with OpenSAFELY (00:18:04)

6. Privacy protection & output checking (00:20:18)

7. Challenges: Data mismatch, privacy & trust (00:21:15)

8. Secure, reproducible science with sensitive data (00:26:24)

9. Outro (00:27:52)