NIHR funding announced for data-enabled trials
29 April 2019
In March 2019, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) announced a call to fund research projects for 'data-enabled trials’.
CPRD is keen to support applications for NIHR funding and is seeking expressions of interest from researchers who wish to address key questions about scalability, efficiencies and benefits of real-world data by utilising CPRD’s 15% UK-wide primary care population coverage, network of research active GP practices across the UK, and range of real-world clinical research services.
If you are interested in using CPRD services as part of your NIHR application, please find below further information and an Expression of Interest (EOI) form.
(Word, 8 pages, 553KB)
The deadline for returning EOIs to CPRD is Friday 31 May 2019.
CPRD study: Comparing CPRD GOLD and ONS death registration data
8 April 2019
Clear information on the date of death is important for censoring in observational epidemiology, especially for analyses of mortality and for studies assessing events at the end of life.
To check the accuracy of recorded date of death in CPRD GOLD a recent study compared the database with death registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The article in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety highlights substantial agreement between the data sources. Gallagher et al found that for censoring follow-up and calculating mortality rates, CPRD data are likely to be sufficient, as a delay in death recording of up to one month is unlikely to impact results significantly.
Where the exact date of death or the cause is important, it may be advisable to include the individually linked death registration data from the ONS.
You can read the open access article in full online:
The accuracy of date of death recording in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink GOLD database in England compared with the Office for National Statistics death registrations (Gallager et al, Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2019; 1– 7)
Find out more about CPRD GOLD and CPRD Aurum on our primary care data web page
See the CPRD bibliography for more than 2,200 papers using CPRD data
Data resource profile for CPRD Aurum
29 March 2019
This month, a paper giving an overview of the CPRD Aurum database has been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Like CPRD GOLD, CPRD Aurum holds routinely collected primary care data, but collected from practices using a different GP IT system. The paper describes the September 2018 CPRD Aurum build, with over 19 million patients in England, of whom 7 million were alive and currently contributing.
The key strengths of CPRD Aurum are its size and coverage (complementing CPRD GOLD), longitudinal follow-up, representativeness, and standard linkages to national secondary care databases as well as deprivation and death registration data.
Since September, CPRD Aurum has continued to grow and includes additional practices from Northern Ireland. Data held by CPRD in the CPRD GOLD and recently introduced CPRD Aurum databases now encompasses over 35 million patient lives, including 11 million currently registered patients.
Read the paper about CPRD Aurum here: Data resource profile: Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum (Wolf et al. Int J Epidemiol. 2019 Mar 11. pii: dyz034)
Find out more about CPRD licences and CPRD Aurum
Reducing antibiotic prescribing in primary care: results from the REDUCE trial
13 February 2019
A cluster randomised trial aiming to reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing, led by King’s College London and supported by CPRD, has published its results. The year-long trial took place between 2016-17 and focused on antibiotic prescribing for respiratory tract infection (RTI) patients.
The trial included 79 CPRD general practices from throughout the UK, with the anonymised data of over half a million patients being analysed. Practices were randomised to control or intervention arms, with those in the intervention arm receiving an antimicrobial stewardship intervention including a short training webinar, access to decision support tools and monthly prescribing feedback reports. The tools included information sheets for patients, providing information on self-care and how they might deal with their symptoms without use of antibiotics.
Results showed a 16% reduction in antibiotic prescribing for RTI in 15-84 year olds compared to control practices and a 12% overall reduction for all ages. An accompanying population cohort analysis of safety outcomes from over 45 million patient lives, from CPRD contributing GP practices that did not receive the intervention, demonstrated that there was no increased bacterial infection risk for RTIs by reducing antibiotic prescribing in primary care.
The full results are published in the BMJ here (Gulliford et al. BMJ 2019;364:l236)
More than 2,000 peer-reviewed publications from research using CPRD data are listed at cprd.com/bibliography
UK’s leading health organisations form Health Data Research Alliance to transform future health and care
8 February 2019
The NHS in England, Scotland and Wales along with Health and Social Care Northern Ireland, NHS Digital, Genomics England, Health Data Research UK, Public Health England and Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) announced today that they will create a non-profit association to accelerate progress in medicine and health.
The UK Health Data Research Alliance, supported by Health Data Research UK, will develop and co-ordinate the adoption of tools, techniques, conventions, technologies, and designs that enable the use of health data in a trustworthy and ethical way for research and innovation. Its founding members will formulate best practice and standards in areas such as privacy, transparency, public engagement, inclusivity and governance to ensure that health data is shared and used responsibly by researchers and innovators.
For the first time, the Alliance will unite expertise to establish best practice in the stewardship of the UK’s health data – including patient data from the NHS, genomic data and other molecular data – to enable faster, more efficient access for research at scale. This will speed up progress in science and medicine at a pace never achieved before in the UK.
Read more on the Health Data Research UK website
See us at DIA Europe
24 January 2019
CPRD will be at the DIA Europe meeting in Vienna, 5-7 February 2019.
Visit us at booth A31 to find out more about using CPRD services for your research and meet members of our interventional research team.
CPRD Director Dr Janet Valentine will be speaking at the following sessions:
Wednesday 6 February
- #S0402: Where will patients come from in the future? EHR and Biobanks, F1 at 12pm
- #CH201: Recent developments and possibilities in using CPRD as ‘Real World Data Source’, Content Hub 2 at 3.15pm
Thursday 7 February
Find out more about the sessions on the DIA Europe 2019 website.
You can find information about events we're attending in 2019 by following us on Twitter @CPRD.
Review of CPRD’s licensing model
21 December 2018
We have improved our data provision services to better meet customer needs
We’ve recently carried out a review of CPRD’s pricing model, to ensure that our public health research services are sustainable for the future.
In addition to providing CPRD GOLD, CPRD’s research services now include CPRD Aurum, containing primary care data from GP practices using EMIS GP software. The introduction of CPRD Aurum means three times as much primary care data is available from CPRD for research. Data from English GP practices in CPRD Aurum are also linked as part of the standard data linkages, providing a threefold increase in total linked data available than with CPRD GOLD alone.
The fees for CPRD’s research services have not changed since 2009, despite rising costs associated with increasing population coverage and expanding data linkage services. We have therefore reviewed our service model so we can continue to offer researchers affordable access to increasing volumes of high quality research-ready data for public health studies now and into the future.
As a not-for-profit, cost recovery UK government research service, CPRD must recoup the cost of delivering research services from data access licence fees. As a result of our review, our licensing model and prices are changing. If your organisation currently has a licence with CPRD we are writing to your account manager about this separately.
Our new licences, which include access to both CPRD GOLD and CPRD Aurum, will be available online from Spring 2019.
For further information on our revised licence model please see our Pricing web page or contact enquiries@cprd.com if you have any questions.
Christmas and New Year office closure dates
14 December 2018
CPRD Enquiries and the CPRD office will be operating a reduced service during Christmas and New Year and will be closed for holidays on the following dates:
- Tuesday 25 December 2018
- Wednesday 26 December 2018
- Tuesday 1 January 2019
Please be aware that the ISAC Secretariat will be closed from 5pm on Friday 21 December 2018, reopening on 2 January 2019. Research protocols, resubmissions, and amendments submitted during this time will not be considered until 2 January, and there may be a delay in responding. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that this may cause.
The CPRD GOLD online service will be available as normal.
Sharing best practice for data-enabled randomised clinical trials
25 October 2018
Clinical triallists, data experts, regulatory bodies and funders came together at the Wellcome Trust on 22 October to share their knowledge and experience on randomised controlled trials (RCTs) driven by routinely collected clinical data.
Delegates at the Frontiers Meeting considered the design and feasibility, recruitment, conduct, data collection and analysis of data-enabled RCTs and discussed how to:
- share practical solutions to actual or perceived barriers to eTrials
- encourage research teams to be ambitious about what these trials can achieve now and in the future
- provide leadership in this area by developing an appropriate commissioning brief for efficient data-enabled RCTs.
Researchers were encouraged to develop proposals based on routine data-driven clinical trials at scale. These could be considered via the usual NIHR funding routes or through relevant topic specific commissioning calls in the future.
The event was jointly sponsored by NIHR Health Technology Assessment Programme (HTA), Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and CPRD. An academic meeting report summarising the outcomes of the meeting will be made publicly available.
To find out how CPRD’s real world research services can support your clinical trial please contact enquiries@cprd.com or visit our interventional studies web page.
See us at the RCGP annual conference
2 October 2018
Visit stand F80 at the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) conference in Glasgow this week to find out more about CPRD.
At the conference, senior researcher Helen Booth from CPRD will be speaking about the RCGP/CPRD quality improvement project in the Promising Approaches to Quality Improvement workshop session.
Find out more about the RCGP/CPRD quality improvement reports
Session
Concurrent session D1: Promising approaches to Quality Improvement
11.30am on Friday 5 October
This session will set out evidence for what works in quality improvement, both at practice and inter-practice levels. It will bring together promising approaches from all four nations of the UK.
Find out more about the conference and workshop at www.rcgpac.org.uk
CPRD at ICPE
15 August 2018
If you’re at this year’s International Conference for Pharmacoepidemiology & Therapeutic Risk Management (ICPE) in Prague, look out for our oral and poster presentations and our exhibition booth #20.
Oral presentations
Hepatic safety of vildagliptin: Multi-database, non-interventional safety study
Date/Time: Saturday 25 August, 8.30am (session starts 8.00 am)
Session title: Diabetes All Mixed Up
Room: South Hall 2B
Posters
Including primary care data from multiple software systems in a data linkage programme: Results from expanding the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD)
Date/Time: Friday 24 August 2018, 8am to 6pm
Title: Poster Session A: Data Linkage
Room: Congress Foyer 3A
Characteristics and treatment patterns of new users of fluticasone furoate/vilanterol: a cohort study set in UK primary care
Date/Time: Sunday 26 August 2018, 8am to 1.45pm
Title:Poster Session C: Drug Utilization - Other
Room: Congress Foyer 2A
Other posters to look out for include:
Utilising the CPRD Pregnancy Register to examine the pattern of antiepileptic drug use during pregnancy in the UK
Comparison of CT-scan and chest x-ray recording in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease patients in a large UK primary and secondary care setting (Clinical Practice Research Datalink and Hospital Episode Statistics)
Find out more about ICPE, 22-26 August 2018
New research opportunities - Linked data sets
4 July 2018
The latest set of linkage data is now available for use in research studies. Set 16 linkage data is available for both CPRD GOLD, based on the Vision software system, and CPRD Aurum, based on EMIS software.
There has been an increase in the coverage periods for linked data sources, inclusion of the newly linked National Radiotherapy Dataset (RTDS) and new small area data linked to the practice postcode: Carstairs Index 2011, Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) domains and the Rural-Urban Classification (RUC).
For information about how CPRD provides routine data linkages between primary care and other health-related patient datasets please visit our Linked Data web page or contact enquiries@cprd.com.
CPRD is on Twitter
8 April 2018
You can keep up to date about CPRD via Twitter.
Follow us @CPRD for the latest news and information about our services and research.
We'll also be posting updates and information about events, meetings and presentations during 2018.
If you have any enquiries about a study please continue to email us at enquiries@cprd.com.
See us at the inaugural Research Conference of the British Journal of General Practice
15 March 2018
CPRD’s Interventional Research team will be presenting further data from the COPE study which was performed with researchers from Imperial College, London at the BJGP Research Conference on Friday 23 March 2018.
The aim of the COPE study was to develop a method of predicting COPD exacerbations utilising personal air quality sensors, environmental exposure modelling and electronic health records through the recruitment of patients from consenting GPs contributing to CPRD.
We look forward to seeing you at our presentation entitled 'Preliminary results from the COPE study using primary-care electronic health records and environmental modelling to examine COPD exacerbations'.
You can find information about the event on the RCGP website.
Get in touch for more information about this study or using CPRD services for your research.
Launch of CPRD Aurum
11 December 2017
CPRD is pleased to announce the launch of a new primary care database now available for public health research, known as CPRD Aurum. This will be offered as a distinct database from CPRD GOLD, with separate pricing.
The CPRD Aurum database contains routinely-collected data from primary care practices using the Egton Medical Information Systems electronic patient record system (EMIS-Web) software, different from the CPRD GOLD database which contains data contributed by practices using Vision software. Data content and health information contained in CPRD Aurum are similar to the CPRD GOLD database but are different with respect to structure and clinical coding.
Together, CPRD Aurum and CPRD GOLD offer customers greater flexibility when choosing the most suitable data to use for research. Our in-house researchers are happy to provide advice on which database to use depending on your research question.
CPRD Aurum will be implemented as a phased roll-out over the coming months, with the first database version released on Monday 11 December 2017. Further information about data release, how to access CPRD Aurum and the differences between CPRD GOLD and CPRD Aurum can be found via the CPRD Aurum page.
If you have any questions about CPRD Aurum please contact enquiries@cprd.com.
Help the MHRA to understand your needs and priorities
18 September 2017
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is conducting a survey to better understand how it can support its customers
As part of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s continued commitment to deliver a high-quality service to its customers, stakeholders and partners, it is embarking on a major operational transformation programme across all three of its expert centres – the MHRA regulatory centre, the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) and CPRD. This includes significant investment in the Agency’s digital capabilities and infrastructure.
Understanding your needs and priorities is essential to inform the Agency’s plans and will help it to strategically shape its services, investment decisions and underlying operational processes and systems. The work the Agency does now will underpin how it is able to meet your needs for years to come.
To help the Agency gain this insight, it has developed a short online survey – in collaboration with PA Consulting, a consulting, technology and innovation firm, and Woodnewton Associates, an independent strategic research agency – to help it understand more about your experience of working with the Agency and your views on where and how it needs to do things differently.
The survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete, depending on how many different parts of the Agency you deal with. In line with the rules of the UK Market Research Society, your contribution will be held in strict confidence and information will not be passed to the Agency in a way that would allow any individual contribution to be identified. You can forward the survey on to others who you think would like to share their views with the Agency.
The survey closes on Wednesday 27th September 2017.
Meet us at ICPE
15 August 2017
CPRD will be presenting a number of studies at this year’s International Conference for Pharmacoepidemiology & Therapeutic Risk Management (ICPE), 28th-30th August 2017 in Montreal, Canada. If you are attending the event, please come along to find out how CPRD data is being used to answer important public health and clinical research questions.
Or you can visit us at stand 13. You will have the opportunity to meet representatives from our observational and interventional research teams and business development colleagues. CPRD supports real world academic, regulatory and industry clinical research worldwide through innovative use of UK health data for observational research and low burden clinical trial management.
Symposium
Optimising design, conduct and interpretation of EHR-enabled randomised clinical trials: Case examples demonstrate the critical role of epidemiology and future challenges
Date/Time: Wednesday 30 August, 10:30-12:00
Room: 520CF
CPRD-GSK-University of Manchester (Mark Wright and Rachael Williams)
Oral presentations
Cardiovascular safety of vildagliptin: Pan-European non-interventional safety study
Date/Time: Monday 28 August, 17:00-18:30
Session: (Cardio) Vascular Safety Outcomes, 524AB
Rachael Williams
Posters
The use of acute hospital care by people with intellectual disabilities
Date/Time: Monday 28 August, 08:00-18:00
Session: Poster Session A: Health Care Utilisation & Costs, 220BC
Jessie Oyinlola and Rachael Williams
Pancreatic cancer and vildagliptin: post-hoc analysis of the pan-European non-interventional safety study
Date/Time: Monday 28 August, 08:00-18:00
Session: Poster Session A: Pharmacovigilance – Cancer, 220BC
Rachael Williams
Does pay-for-performance influence outcomes for people with serious mental illness?
Date/Time: Tuesday 29 August, 08:00-18:00
Session: Poster Session B: Informed Drug Policy, 220BC
Rachael Williams
Pancreatic safety of vildagliptin: Pan-European non-interventional safety study
Date/Time: Tuesday 29 August, 08:00-18:00
Session: Poster Session B: Pharmacovigilance – Diabetes, 220BC
Find out more about ICPE in Montreal
Our contact details have changed
2 May 2017
We have changed the name of our customer services system from CPRD Knowledge Centre to CPRD Enquiries.
This means that emails you receive will be from CPRD Enquiries and we will use our new email address enquiries@cprd.com
This change is part of our ongoing improvements to the efficiency of the CPRD point of contact system, and better reflects that we are here to respond to general enquiries as well as complex questions.
Any emails sent to our old email address will continue to reach us over the next few months. Our telephone number will remain the same and log in details for the customer website will not change.
Vacancies for Independent Scientific Advisory Committee Members
We are now seeking scientific members to join the MHRA Independent Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC). We are interested in applicants with considerable expertise and research experience in select areas.
Data Linkages
Following the announcement in July CPRD has now implemented the amendment to its policy on release of linked data. Linked data will only be released once ISAC has approved the study protocol. This policy will apply to any study in which patient level data are analysed, whether or not the results of the analysis will be published or otherwise communicated to third parties.
The following are excluded from this policy:
- Incidence and prevalence counts, cohort definitions and simple counts of patient numbers for feasibility purposes
- Linkage between primary care data and small area socio-economic status scores, solely in circumstance in which the results of analysis will not be published or otherwise communicated to third parties
Please note that for any studies which are to be published or otherwise communicated to third parties, prior ISAC approval of the study protocol is already required.
If you have any queries about this message, or would like any further information, please contact us at enquiries@cprd.com
Data Linkages – Clarification
CPRD is implementing an amendment to its policy on release of linked data. Once the revised policy is implemented, linked data will only be released once ISAC has approved the study protocol. This policy will apply to any study in which patient level data are analysed, whether or not the results of the analysis will be published or otherwise communicated to third parties.
The following will be excluded from this policy:
- incidence and prevalence counts, cohort definitions and simple counts of patient numbers for feasibility purposes
- linkage between primary care data and small area socio-economic status scores, solely in circumstance in which the results of analysis will not be published or otherwise communicated to third parties
The revised policy will be implemented from 1st September 2016. Please note that for any studies which are to be published or otherwise communicated to third parties, prior ISAC approval of the study protocol is already required.
If you have any queries about this message, or would like any further information, please contact us at enquiries@cprd.com
Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency statement on the outcome of the EU referendum
27 June 2016
The Agency's response to the outcome of the EU referendum
Following the result of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, the focus of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency continues to be on our public health role. We will continue to work to the highest levels of excellence and quality, working with and supporting our customers, partners and stakeholders to protect health and improve lives.
Working closely with government we will consider the implications for the work of the Agency. We will continue to make a major contribution globally to improving public health through the effective regulation of medicines and medical devices, underpinned by science and research.
Approved studies using CPRD Data
Applications to access CPRD data for observational research are reviewed the Independent Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC). Approval by ISAC is required for researchers to carry out their proposed studies.
A summary of all ISAC approved protocols, including a lay and technical summary of the proposed research, are published 3 months after researchers have access to the data to begin their study.
Please click here to access the full list of the approved protocols.
[Page last reviewed 23 April 2021]