Price hike makes access to patient data unaffordable, say researchers

The Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD)—a valuable source of patient care data—is now unaffordable for many non-industry funded UK researchers after the introduction of a new pricing structure, a group of academics has said.

The CPRD, a not-for-profit service to which 1600 general practices contribute data, is now managed by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (https://www.cprd.com/). The MHRA argued that the costs for accessing the data services had not changed since 2009, despite rising operating costs and a threefold increase in data volumes.

In a rapid response to The BMJ, Tom Macdonald, professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Dundee, and nine other academics said that the cost of using CPRD has risen “very substantially” resulting in “many academic …