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About Us
The Doctors Independent Network (DIN) is a registered charity of over 600 GPs in 160+ general practices. Each member practice contributes complete anonymised data on all its routine clinical activity to the DIN central database. The dataset collected includes the Read version 2 code and its rubric, any associated numeric data excludes any linked free text. The DIN system has been accumulating individual anonymised UK patient records since 1992 - in many instances these longitudinal records go back to 1987, producing a database greater than 50 million patient years in total size.

The network is represented in England, Scotland and Wales.

Membership is open to any UK clinician in Primary Care. In the future we would like to open membership to secondary care clinicians but this will have to wait until Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) are available and used by these clinicians.

Memberships fees are under review depending on the result of meetings we are having with potential commercial partners.

The aims of DIN are:
  • To serve the communication needs of the medical profession and thereby to encourage excellence
  • To facilitate local, district, regional and national clinical audit
  • To establish and promote a national, independent, clinically secure medical computer network supervised by registered clinicians and governed by the same strict ethics used by its contributors
  • To provide a confidential medium for electronically conveying data entrusted to it by members on behalf of their patients, in accordance with the principles of medical ethics
  • To facilitate the ethical use of anonymised clinical data for epidemiology, commissioning and research by individual practices, localities, Primary Care Organisations (PCOs), Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and possibly the Department of Health (DoH) for strategic planning. (The requirements of other relevant bodies can also be considered as appropriate)
  • To comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act and associated UK legislation
The database is a direct download of normal working activity (hence no additional work is required) and no cash incentives are provided for the GPs to produce data. DIN feels therefore that their system is an unbiased fair representation of GP activities that may be scaled up to represent Great Britain.
Registered Charity Number: 1052256
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Click here to read DIN's recently published article to The Times on patient confidentiality