QCovid® risk calculator
QCovid® is a clinical decision tool intended to support conversations between clinically trained professionals and patients about COVID-19 risk.
QCovid was developed as a model to estimate a person’s risk of being hospitalised or dying due to catching coronavirus.
Clinicians: to use QCovid® to assess a patient, please use the NHS Digital COVID-19 Clinical Risk Assessment Tool .
Patients: for more information on how NHS staff may use QCovid® to support you, please visit https://digital.nhs.uk/coronavirus/risk-assessment/clinical-tool/information-for-patients .
The QCovid® tool below may be used by clinically trained professionals, for academic research or for peer review in Great Britain only. Before using the tool, please make sure your organisation has a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) in place that covers your use of the tool.
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More details about QCovid®
QCovid® was used by NHS Digital to identify patients in England at high risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes, adding an additional 1.7 million people to the national shielded patient list in February 2021 and prioritising them for vaccination.
How QCovid® was developed?
QCovid® was commissioned in 2020 by the Chief Medical Officer for England on behalf of the UK government. The first QCovid® tool was developed using the QResearch database hosted at Oxford. This database has anonymised data from GP and hospital records, COVID-19 test results and death registries. Factors such as age and medical conditions which were found to increase risk relating to coronavirus were used to build a risk prediction model. The model, QCovid®, estimates someone’s combined risk of catching coronavirus and being admitted to hospital and their combined risk of catching coronavirus and dying.
The tool has now been updated to include factors such as vaccination status and background infection rate. There is a need to identify those at highest risk of severe outcomes if infected with COVID-19, even if individuals are vaccinated.
The model was tested to find out whether it accurately predicted severe outcomes due to COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in England. More recently, it has been tested on vaccinated individuals between December 2020 and June 2021.
The research, published in the BMJ, showed that the model performed well in predicting severe outcomes due to COVID-19 (death and hospitalisation) in both models.
The Team
The research team is led by Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox at the University of Oxford
The QCovid team includes researchers from:
- University of Nottingham
- London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine,
- University of Leicester,
- Swansea University,
- Queen's University Belfast,
- University of Edinburgh,
- Department of Health and Social Care,
- NHS England and Improvement,
- Queen Mary University of London,
- University of Liverpool,
- University College London,
- NHSx and
- NHS Digital.
Request a licence
QCovid.org is available for free to be used in Great Britain by clinically trained professionals, for academic research and peer review purposes. To request a licence for any other use or to request use of the Calculation Engine code please contact us via email with details of with details of your requirements.
Clinicians, to use QCovid® to assess a patient, please use the NHS Digital COVID-19 Clinical Risk Assessment Tool.
Awards
The team are proud to have been recognised for the contribution of QCovid® to healthcare in the UK.
QCovid® won the Florence Nightingale Award in July 2021. Read more on the Royal Statistical Society website.
QCovid® was awarded the John Perry Prize in October 2021. www.phcsg.org
QCovid® received Highly Commended in the category of “Best use of technology in patient safety” by the Patient Safety Awards 2021. https://awards.patientsafetycongress.co.uk/winners-2021
RCGP paper of the year.