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trud

The goal of trud is to provide a convenient R interface to the National Health Service (NHS) England Technology Reference data Update Distribution (TRUD).

The NHS TRUD service provides essential reference files that underpin a wide range of electronic health record (EHR) areas, both in the UK and internationally. These files include clinical coding systems such as ICD, Read codes, prescription codes, and the SNOMED CT ontology, with regular updates to reflect new knowledge and changes in clinical practice. NHS TRUD content supports key research areas like disease phenotyping, cohort selection, epidemiology, health services research, and the development of risk prediction models.

trud enables seamless, programmatic retrieval and updating of NHS TRUD release items, removing the need for manual downloads and reducing the risk of errors or version drift. This helps researchers maintain reproducible, up-to-date analyses — whether as part of ad-hoc studies or automated pipelines.

To learn more about NHS TRUD and its available resources, visit the NHS TRUD website.

Installation

You can install this package from CRAN:

Or you can install the development version of trud from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("rmgpanw/trud")

You will also need to sign up for a free account with NHS TRUD

Available functionality

The main functions provided by trud are get_item_metadata() and download_item(). Use trud_items() to list available items and their IDs, as retrieved from the NHS TRUD website:

library(trud)
trud_items()
#> # A tibble: 73 × 2
#>    item_number item_name                                                        
#>          <int> <chr>                                                            
#>  1         246 Cancer Outcomes and Services Data Set XML Schema                 
#>  2         245 Commissioning Data Set XML Schema                                
#>  3         599 Community Services Data Set Intermediate Database                
#>  4         393 Community Services Data Set post-deadline extract XML Schema     
#>  5         394 Community Services Data Set pre-deadline extract XML Schema      
#>  6         391 Community Services Data Set XML Schema                           
#>  7         248 Diagnostic Imaging Data Set XML Schema                           
#>  8         239 dm+d XML transformation tool                                     
#>  9        1859 Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration Data Sets XM…
#> 10        1819 Emergency Care Data Set XML Schema                               
#> # ℹ 63 more rows

Please see vignette("trud") for further information and getting started.

Citing trud

If you find trud useful, please consider citing it. Citation details are available here.

Community guidelines

Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome; file issues or seek support here. If you would like to contribute to the package, please see our contributing guidelines.

Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.