Smeets, Hugo M.
Kortekaas, Marlous F.
Rutten, Frans H.
Bots, Michiel L.
van der Kraan, Willem
Daggelders, Gerard
Smits-Pelser, Hanneke
Helsper, Charles W.
Hoes, Arno W.
de Wit, Niek J.
Article History
Received: 7 December 2017
Accepted: 7 September 2018
First Online: 25 September 2018
Authors’ information
: All authors work at the Julius Centre or work as a GP and have been involved in the JGPN for quite some years.
: Research in the Julius General Practitioners’ Network is observational, without an intervention, and enlisted patients are not individually approached for participation. Therefore, the Medical Ethics Committees in the Netherlands do not rank such research as subject to the Dutch ‘Wet medisch-wetenschappelijk onderzoek’ (WMO; Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act), but researchers need to conform to privacy legislation. The complete pseudomised dataset is stored safely, and only copies of parts of it are delivered to researchers after they have requested it and the Julius General Practitioners’ Network has agreed on executing their research proposal. Such data sets are made only available under the strict condition of anonymity, and researchers have to give written consent to destroy the data at the end of their study. In the data linkage process privacy is ensured by the so-called pseudonymisation procedure; linkage codes are destroyed after successful data linkage.
: Not Applicable
: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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