The heart disease risk assessment tool QRisk2 has been made available as open source software by Nottingham University and healthcare IT suppliers EMIS.
The university and EMIS said the decision would mean all users, including academics, PCTs and commercial health software suppliers, would be able to develop software using QRisk2 free of charge.
The move follows research published in the BMJ last week that concluded that QRisk2 was more accurate at identifying people in the UK at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease than the Framingham equation.
Dr David Stables, EMIS’s director of strategic development and co-founder of QResearch, the clinical database used to develop QRisk2, said EMIS was delighted that the software was now available as open source.
He added: “In addition to being implemented within EMIS systems – covering 52 per cent of all UK GP practices – QRisk2 has now been adopted by almost all the other GP system suppliers, many PCTs and pharmacies and a number of hospitals.
"This latest move will open it up to even more users – which can only be of huge benefit to the nation’s health.”
Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox, from Nottingham University’s Division of Primary Care and medical director of ClinRisk which developed the software, said it would arm users with the information they needed to decide how best to target patients at risk.
She added: “QRisk2 is more accurate for our ethnically diverse UK population and has the potential to save many thousands of lives from heart disease – the nation’s biggest killer.”
The QRisk2 software was developed in collaboration with ClinRisk, a company that produces algorithms for clinical use together with open and closed source software to help their implementation in clinical practice. ClinRisk is to continue to licence its software development kits for QRisk2.