Jessica Morley

University of Oxford | OX · Oxford Internet Institute

Background Obesity and rapid weight gain are established risk factors for noncommunicable diseases and have emerged as independent risk factors for severe disease following Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. Restrictions imposed to reduce COVID-19 transmission resulted in profound societal changes that impacted many health behaviours, i...

Background The UK delivered its first “booster” COVID-19 vaccine doses in September 2021, initially to individuals at high risk of severe disease, then to all adults. The BNT162b2 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was used initially, then also Moderna mRNA-1273. Methods With the approval of the National Health Service England, we used routine clinical data...

Electronic health records (EHRs) and other administrative health data are increasingly used in research to generate evidence on the effectiveness, safety, and utilisation of medical products and services, and to inform public health guidance and policy. Reproducibility is a fundamental step for research credibility and promotes trust in evidence ge...

Electronic health records (EHRs) and other administrative health data are increasingly used in research to generate evidence on the effectiveness, safety, and utilisation of medical products and services, and to inform public health guidance and policy. Reproducibility is a fundamental step for research credibility and promotes trust in evidence ge...

Background: COVID-19 pandemic restrictions may have influenced behaviours related to weight. Aims: To describe patterns of weight change amongst adults living in England with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and/or hypertension during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design and Setting With the approval of NHS England, we conducted an observational cohort study using t...

Objective To identify the availability of results for trials registered on the European Union Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR) compared with other dissemination routes to understand its value as a results repository. Design Cross sectional audit study. Setting EUCTR protocols and results sections, data extracted 1-3 December 2020. Population Ran...

Background Germ Defence ( www.germdefence.org ) is an evidence-based interactive website that promotes behaviour change for infection control within households. To maximise the potential of Germ Defence to effectively reduce the spread of COVID-19, the intervention needed to be implemented at scale rapidly. Methods With NHS England approval, we co...

Background Sepsis, characterised by significant morbidity and mortality, is intricately linked to socioeconomic disparities and pre-admission clinical histories. This study aspires to elucidate the association between non-COVID-19 related sepsis and health inequality risk factors amidst the pandemic in England, with a secondary focus on their assoc...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic affected how care was delivered to vulnerable patients, such as those with dementia or learning disability. Objective To explore whether this affected antipsychotic prescribing in at-risk populations. Methods With the approval of NHS England, we completed a retrospective cohort study, using the OpenSAFELY platform...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on delivery of NHS care. We have developed the OpenSAFELY Service Restoration Observatory (SRO) to develop key measures of primary care activity and describe the trends in these measures throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: With the approval of NHS England, we developed an open...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on delivery of NHS care. We have developed the OpenSAFELY Service Restoration Observatory (SRO) to develop key measures of primary care activity and describe the trends in these measures throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on delivery of NHS care. We have developed the OpenSAFELY Service Restoration Observatory (SRO) to develop key measures of primary care activity and describe the trends in these measures throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on delivery of NHS care. We have developed the OpenSAFELY Service Restoration Observatory (SRO) to develop key measures of primary care activity and describe the trends in these measures throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Cardiovascular disease management in primary care in England was disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective: We aim to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on blood pressure screening and hypertension management, based upon a national quality of care scheme (Quality and Outcomes Framework, QOF) across key demographic, reg...

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination programme in England was extended to include all adolescents and children by April 2022. The aim of this paper is to describe trends and variation in vaccine coverage in different clinical and demographic groups amongst adolescents and children in England by August 2022. Methods: With...

Objective To implement complex, PINCER (pharmacist led information technology intervention) prescribing indicators, on a national scale with general practice data to describe the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on safe prescribing. Design Population based, retrospective cohort study using federated analytics. Setting Electronic general practice h...

Background: COVID-19 has been shown to differently affect various demographic and clinical population subgroups. We aimed to describe trends in absolute and relative COVID-19-related mortality risks across clinical and demographic population subgroups during successive SARS-CoV-2 pandemic waves. Methods: We did a retrospective cohort study in En...

Background We investigated which clinical and sociodemographic characteristics were associated with unhealthy patterns of weight gain amongst adults living in England during the pandemic. Methods With the approval of NHS England we conducted an observational cohort study of Body Mass Index (BMI) changes between March 2015 and March 2022 using the O...

Objective To compare the effectiveness of the BNT162b2 mRNA (Pfizer-BioNTech) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) covid-19 vaccines during the booster programme in England. Design Matched cohort study, emulating a comparative effectiveness trial. Setting Linked primary care, hospital, and covid-19 surveillance records available within the OpenSAFELY-TPP rese...

Introduction The impact of long COVID on health-related quality of-life (HRQoL) and productivity is not currently known. It is important to understand who is worst affected by long COVID and the cost to the National Health Service (NHS) and society, so that strategies like booster vaccines can be prioritised to the right people. OpenPROMPT aims to...

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination programme in England was extended to include all adolescents and children by April 2022. The aim of this paper is to describe trends and variation in vaccine coverage in different clinical and demographic groups amongst adolescents and children in England. Methods: With the approval of...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted healthcare activity across a broad range of clinical services. The NHS stopped non-urgent work in March 2020, later recommending services be restored to near-normal levels before winter where possible. Aim: To describe changes in the volume and variation of coded clinical activity in general practi...

Objective To ascertain patient eligibility status and describe coverage of antiviral drugs and neutralising monoclonal antibodies (nMAB) as treatment for covid-19 in community settings in England. Design Retrospective, descriptive cohort study, approved by NHS England. Setting Routine clinical data from 23.4 million people linked to data on covid...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected health and social care services. We aimed to explore whether this impacted the prescribing rates of antipsychotics within at-risk populations. Methods With the approval of NHS England, we completed a retrospective cohort study, using the OpenSAFELY platform to explore primary care data of 59 m...

Quantifying the waning effectiveness of second COVID-19 vaccination beyond six months and against the omicron variant is important for scheduling subsequent doses. With the approval of NHS England, we estimated effectiveness up to one year after second dose, but found that bias in such estimates may be substantial.

Much focus of the emerging research front known as platform governance is concerned with content moderation and other ways in which platform companies govern users and activity on their own platforms, as well as with how platforms are themselves governed by states (Gorwa, Inf Commun Soc 22(6): 854–871, 2019). Meanwhile, a related but distinct inter...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on delivery of NHS care. We have developed the OpenSAFELY Service Restoration Observatory (SRO) to describe this impact on primary care activity and monitor its recovery. Objectives To develop key measures of primary care activity and describe the trends in these measures throughout the...

Events such as the riot at the United States Capitol and tightening constraints on the Russian public sphere have highlighted the socio-political significance of app store governance. This is dominated by Apple and Google as operators of the two largest smartphone platforms. In this article, we analyse two case studies: the removals from app stores...

In this article, we compare the artificial intelligence strategies of China and the European Union, assessing the key similarities and differences regarding what the high-level aims of each governance strategy are, how the development and use of AI is promoted in the public and private sectors, and whom these policies are meant to benefit. We chara...

Background Data analysis is used to identify signals suggestive of variation in treatment choice or clinical outcome. Analyses to date have generally focused on a hypothesis-driven approach. Objective This study aimed to develop a hypothesis-free approach to identify unusual prescribing behavior in primary care data. We aimed to apply this methodo...

Background The UK COVID-19 vaccination programme delivered its first “booster” doses in September 2021, initially in groups at high risk of severe disease then across the adult population. The BNT162b2 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was used initially, with Moderna mRNA-1273 subsequently also used. Methods We used the OpenSAFELY-TPP database, covering 40...

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016 (Mit...

Background Although advanced analytical techniques falling under the umbrella heading of artificial intelligence (AI) may improve health care, the use of AI in health raises safety and ethical concerns. There are currently no internationally recognized governance mechanisms (policies, ethical standards, evaluation, and regulation) for developing an...

By mid-2019 there were more than 80 AI ethics guides available in the public domain. Despite this, 2020 saw numerous news stories break related to ethically questionable uses of AI. In part, this is because AI ethics theory remains highly abstract, and of limited practical applicability to those actually responsible for designing algorithms and AI...

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s (Samuel in Science, 132(3429):741–742, 1960. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.132.3429.741; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented...

This article presents a mapping review of the literature concerning the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care. The goal of this review is to summarise current debates and identify open questions for future research. Five literature databases were searched (Scopus, Google Scholar, Philpapers, Web of Science, Pub Med), in April 2019,...

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016 (Mit...

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence (AI), entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’ (新一代人工智能发展规划). This strategy outlined China’s aims to become a world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan ($150 billion) industry, and to emerge as t...

Important decisions that impact human lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment are increasingly being automated. Delegating tasks to so-called automated decision-making systems (ADMS) can improve efficiency and enable new solutions. However, these benefits are coupled with ethical challenges. For example, ADMS may produce discriminatory outc...

Important decisions that impact humans lives, livelihoods, and the natural environment are increasingly being automated. Delegating tasks to so-called automated decision-making systems (ADMS) can improve efficiency and enable new solutions. However, these benefits are coupled with ethical challenges. For example, ADMS may produce discriminatory out...

UNSTRUCTURED The potential presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) for healthcare has long been recognised by the technical community. More recently, this potential has been recognised by policymakers, resulting in considerable public and private investment in the development of AI for healthcare across the globe. Despite this, excepting limited...

BACKGROUND Although advanced analytical techniques falling under the umbrella heading of artificial intelligence (AI) may improve health care, the use of AI in health raises safety and ethical concerns. There are currently no internationally recognized governance mechanisms (policies, ethical standards, evaluation, and regulation) for developing an...

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment fro...

The gig economy is a phenomenon that is rapidly expanding, redefining the nature of work and contributing to a significant change in how contemporary economies are organised. Its expansion is not unproblematic. This article provides a clear and systematic analysis of the main ethical challenges caused by the gig economy. Following a brief overview...

The potential presented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) for healthcare has long been recognised by the technical community. More recently, this potential has been recognised by policymakers, resulting in considerable public and private investment in the development of AI for healthcare across the globe. Despite this, excepting limited success stori...

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence (AI), entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’ (新一代人工智能发展规划). This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan (ca. 150 billion dollars) industry, and t...

As the range of potential uses for Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning (ML), has increased, so has awareness of the associated ethical issues. This increased awareness has led to the realisation that existing legislation and regulation provides insufficient protection to individuals, groups, society, and the environment fro...

The fact that Internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This study investigates the relationship between search engines' approach to privacy and the scientific quality of the information they return. Our study suggests that desi...

The gig economy is a phenomenon that is rapidly expanding, redefining the nature of work and contributing to a significant change in how contemporary economies are organised. Its expansion is not unproblematic. This article provides a clear and systematic analysis of the main ethical challenges caused by the gig economy. Following a brief overview...

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s (Samuel in Science, 132(3429):741-742, 1960. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.132.3429.741; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented...

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016 (Mit...

This article presents a mapping review of the literature concerning the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care. The goal of this review is to summarise current debates and identify open questions for future research. Five literature databases were searched to support the following research question: how can the primary ethical risks...

This article highlights the limitations of the tendency to frame health- and wellbeing-related digital tools (mHealth technologies) as empowering devices, especially as they play an increasingly important role in the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. It argues that mHealth technologies should instead be framed as digital companions. This shi...

Protect privacy, equality and fairness in digital contact tracing with these key questions. Protect privacy, equality and fairness in digital contact tracing with these key questions.

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this article, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals...

UNSTRUCTURED Since 2016, social media companies and news providers have come under pressure to tackle the spread of political mis- and disinformation (MDI) online. However, despite evidence that online health MDI (on the web, on social media, and within mobile apps) also has negative real-world effects, there has been a lack of comparable action by...

Common mental health disorders are rising globally, creating a strain on public healthcare systems. This has led to a renewed interest in the role that digital technologies may have for improving mental health outcomes. One result of this interest is the development and use of artificial intelligence for assessing, diagnosing, and treating mental h...

This paper argues that these apps are the product of inadequate evaluation and regulation.

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifica...

Health-care systems worldwide face increasing demand, a rise in chronic disease, and resource constraints. At the same time, the use of digital health technologies in all care settings has led to an expansion of data. For this reason, policy makers, politicians, clinical entrepreneurs, and computer and data scientists argue that a key part of healt...

The fact that internet companies may record our personal data and track our online behavior for commercial or political purpose has emphasized aspects related to online privacy. This has also led to the development of search engines that promise no tracking and privacy. Search engines also have a major role in spreading low-quality health informati...

Healthcare systems across the globe are struggling with increasing costs and worsening outcomes. This presents those responsible for overseeing healthcare with a challenge. Increasingly, policymakers, politicians, clinical entrepreneurs and computer and data scientists argue that a key part of the solution will be ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) – p...

Healthcare systems across the globe are struggling with increasing costs and worsening outcomes. This presents those responsible for overseeing healthcare with a challenge. Increasingly, policymakers, politicians, clinical entrepreneurs and computer and data scientists argue that a key part of the solution will be 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI)-par...

Common mental health disorders are rising globally, creating a strain on public healthcare systems. This has led to a renewed interest in the role that digital technologies may have for improving mental health outcomes. One result of this interest is the development and use of artificial intelligence for assessing, diagnosing, and treating mental h...

On 8 th August 2019, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, announced the creation of a £250 million NHS AI Lab. This significant investment is justified on the belief that transforming the UK's National Health Service (NHS) into a more informationally mature and heterogeneous organisation, reliant on data-based and algorithmi...

The increased availability of data has enabled the development of Artificially Intelligent Systems (AIS) for health, but implementing these systems and capitalising on the associated opportunities is not straightforward. To mitigate these risks, outdated governance mechanisms need to be updated and key questions answered. To achieve this, whilst st...

It has been suggested that to overcome the challenges facing the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) of an ageing population and reduced available funding, the NHS should be transformed into a more informationally mature and heterogeneous organisation, reliant on data-based and algorithmically-driven interactions between human, artificial, and hybri...

Digital Health Tools (DHTs), also known as patient self-surveilling strategies, have increasingly been promoted by health-care policy makers as technologies that have the capacity to transform patients’ lives. At the heart of the debate is the notion of empowerment. In this paper, we argue that what is required is not so much empowerment but rather...

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifica...

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s (Wiener, 1960) (Samuel, 1960). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by (Deep) Neural Networks and Machine Learning (ML) techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the con...

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s. However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone...