See the next steps

Congratulations! You've covered all the basics that you need to develop a study on your own computer, verify that it can run against real data, and publish it to GitHub.

To proceed from here, there is an application process to follow, and more about OpenSAFELY that you will need to learn.

Applying for OpenSAFELY access

To write a real study and run it against actual patient data, you will first need to get permission for your project from the data controllers for the NHS England OpenSAFELY COVID-19 service.

• Read about our onboarding programme.

Further learning

To learn more about OpenSAFELY, we recommend the sections of our documentation about:

• our electronic health record query language, ehrQL
• scripted actions
• using Git
• using GitHub Codespaces in your project

We also recommend:

• OpenSAFELY Jobs
• the Visual Studio Code introduction to Git