The use of primary care big data for COVID-19 research: A consensus statement from the COVID-19 Primary Care Database Consortium

Abstract

The use of big data containing millions of primary care medical records provides an opportunity for rapid research to help inform patient care and policy decisions during the first and subsequent waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Routinely collected UK primary care data have previously been used for national pandemic surveillance, quantifying associations between exposures and outcomes, identifying high-risk populations and examining the effects of interventions at scale. However, there is no consensus on how to effectively conduct or report these data for COVID-19 research. A COVID-19 primary care database consortium was established in April 2020. Collectively, its researchers have ongoing COVID-19 projects in overlapping datasets with millions of primary care records representing 30% of the UK population, that are variously linked to public health, secondary care and vital status records. This consensus agreement is aimed at facilitating transparency and rigour in methodological approaches, as well as consistency in defining and reporting cases, exposures, confounders, stratification variables and outcomes in relation to the pharmacoepidemiology of COVID-19. This will facilitate comparison, validation and pooling of research during and after the pandemic.