Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

19 Feb 2018

The FDAAA TrialsTracker is Live!

This week, we launched our FDAAA TrialsTracker which gives you a live look at whether individual sponsors and trialists are meeting their responsibility to report the results of clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov. A lot of work went into the tracker and making sure we got it right. You can read all about our methods, in detail, here but the short version goes like this… Certain trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, the US trial registry run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are required to report their results.

5 Feb 2018

Price Concessions - starting to reduce? UPDATED

The latest price concession information for January has been released by the PSNC (in fact, two sets of data in quick succession). The PSNC have also stated that they are “still in discussion with the DHSC regarding further January 2018 price concessions”. Therefore we have made some calculations based on what we know at the moment - as soon as there are changes we will update this blog. UPDATE: We’ve now updated the data, both with the final concessions list for January 2018, and the actual cost data for December 2017.

2 Feb 2018

Omega-3 isn't very effective: using prescribing data to explore the impact of trials, reviews, and guidelines

We’ve been thinking in the Bennett Institute about doing stories, using our prescribing data, to go with landmark clinical trials and systematic reviews. Here’s an example. A new systematic review published this week in JAMA shows that Omega-3 “fish oil” pills don’t really help improve cardiovascular health. As a systematic review, it’s a very useful overview of previous existing research. Perhaps reassuringly, as that evidence accumulated over time, clinicians were already changing their prescribing behaviour.

24 Jan 2018

OpenPrescribing January 2018 Newsletter

New Year - same Price Concessions issues… Everyone at the Bennett Institute wishes you a very Happy New Year! Unfortunately, the NHS is still having the same problems in sourcing generics. The PSNC announced the latest list of price concessions for December 2017, slightly smaller than November’s, with 86 lines. However, we still estimated a monthly impact for the NHS in December of £27 million, bringing the total excess cost for the nine months to December to £285 million:

3 Jan 2018

New Year - same Price Concessions issues…

Everyone at the Bennett Institute wishes you a very Happy New Year! Unfortunately, the NHS is still having the same problems in sourcing generics. The PSNC have just announced the latest list of price concessions for December 2017. The list was slightly smaller than November’s, with 86 lines,but we are still estimating an monthly impact for the NHS in December of £27 million. This brings the total excess cost for the nine months to December to £285 million:

3 Jan 2018

Trends and variation in gluten-free food prescribing

Many people I’ve spoken to aren’t aware that gluten-free foods can be prescribed, but it happens quite extensively in an effort to help patients with coeliac disease adhere to a gluten-free diet. Below is a chart showing the rate of gluten-free product prescribing since 1998, where there is a gradual increase until 2011, when guidance changed to recommend only prescribing of staple foods such as bread and flour. Recently there has been a sharper decline.

20 Dec 2017

2017 Round-Up

In our second full year of existence we produced even more exciting outputs and continued to grow. You can see the team on our website: Emma-Jane has been our project manager since the Spring; we have two new part-time coders working for us; and researchers Alex, Nick, Daniel and Karolina all started this year. We’ve delivered a range of great new features on OpenPrescribing, got great progress on numerous pre-launch projects, and have a nice portfolio of papers submitted.

14 Dec 2017

Price Concessions - why are the excess costs lower in November than October 2017?

We’ve taken a quick look at the data to see why, despite the number of price concession lines have increased to 91 in November, the estimated total excess cost has reduced. (Reminder - we’ve used September prescribing data to estimate the effects, as that’s the latest data available). The full table is below, but here are some highlights: Some of the price concessions have reduced since October. For example, olanzapine 10mg tabs have dropped considerably, from £62/box to under £27/box - although the tariff price has increased from just over £1/box at the beginning of the year.

14 Dec 2017

Price Concessions Estimate for November 2017 - CCG data

The PSNC has published the list today of Price Concessions for November 2017. The list is the biggest yet, at 91 lines. We’ve taken a first stab at calculating the estimated effect for CCGs, using September 2017 prescribing data. The Google Sheet can be found here. (edit) - the Google Sheet now also contains national calculations per presentation and all CCG presentation data. A couple of calculation changes: The PSNC spreadsheet had a typo, listing the Zolmitriptan 2.

13 Dec 2017

Price concessions data for CCGs, including October 2017 estimate

We have been writing a lot recently about the effect of price concessions on the NHS primary care drugs bill, and on the problems community pharmacy are facing. We’ve been asked for some CCG-level data, and so here it is; both for the confirmed data for April-September 2017, and for an estimate for October, which is based on October price concession data with September’s prescribing data. (edit) We’ve also been asked how the costs were calculated.

11 Dec 2017

Getting the data for the Drug Tariff tool (sigh)

Today we’ve released our new Drug Tariff viewer. It was a dataset that we previously didn’t hold, but thought that it would be useful to turn into a graphical viewer for people to use to see how the reimbursement price on drugs changes over time, and also to use as the basis of the effect that price concessions are having on the NHS. However, obtaining and normalising the data proved to be a bit of a challenge.

11 Dec 2017

New interactive OpenPrescribing tool: Explore Changes in the Drug Tariff (and out of stock medicines) back to 2010!

The Drug Tariff, published on behalf of the Department of Health and updated monthly, is a strange and mysterious document, written largely in legalese, and understood by pharmacists and almost no-one else. Ask a GP where they find out the cost of the drug, and they’ll say either their computer system or the BNF. For pharmacists, it’s usually the Drug Tariff (or the Tariff). And that’s usually where the most accurate price will be found.

7 Dec 2017

Drug shortages and "Price Concessions" - how much is it costing the NHS?

There has been an interesting and concerning story in The Times today regarding shortages on a number of commonly-used medicines and a corresponding increase in the costs. Here at OpenPrescribing we have been taking a look at these data as well, and trying to estimate to the cost to the NHS this year. As the Times article suggested, the excess costs are now hitting £50m per month, with £175m extra spent in primary care by September:

4 Dec 2017

OpenPrescribing December 2017 Newsletter

New: Analyse page no longer needs a denominator One of the most common requests we receive is to be able to use the analyse page without needing to select a denominator, so that you can simply see how much of a drug is being prescribed in each CCG or practice. We’ve now made this feature available. When creating an analysis, simply select “nothing” in the versus dropdown, and you can then see raw monthly data for each practice or CCG.

3 Nov 2017

OpenPrescribing November 2017 Newsletter

Long Term Trends Tool! All prescribing, 1998-2016 We have created a new interactive tool for exploring the national Prescribing Cost Analysis (PCA) data, allowing you to investigate prescribing trends over 19 years from 1998 to 2016. We’ve done a huge amount of hard work to make this tool simple and easy. For example, lots of drug names have changed over time, treatments have moved between Chapters of the BNF, or been assigned new codes.

12 Oct 2017

New OpenPrescribing tool: long-term prescribing trends, back to 1998!

We have created a new interactive tool for exploring the national Prescribing Cost Analysis (PCA) data, allowing you to investigate prescribing trends going back to 1998. The PCA data contains annual data on all drugs dispensed in the community in England. Note this makes it slightly different to the monthly dataset used elsewhere on OpenPrescribing which shows how items were prescribed in England. This means that, for example, in PCA data generic products will not appear until the generic is available to be dispensed, and prescriptions written in Wales will be included provided they were dispensed in England.

6 Oct 2017

OpenPrescribing October 2017 Newsletter

We send out monthly newsletters for OpenPrescribing, detailing new features and updates, which you can sign up for here. Our latest issue is below: Low Priority Treatments NHS England recently launched a consultation on new prescribing guidelines, which lists treatments that should generally no longer be prescribed. We have launched a new tool that allows you to explore the prescribing of these ’low value’ items in any GP Practice or CCG in England.

2 Oct 2017

Publication Bias: in cake form - Bennett Institute at the Curiosity Carnival

We were at Oxford University’s Curiosity Carnival, an event featuring researchers from all disciplines enthusiastically explaining their work to members of the public in an enormous variety of forms, all around the city. We entered the Great Research Bake-Off and took on the challenge of representing some of the key issues around research integrity through the medium of cake. We displayed an array of fairy cakes, each representing clinical trials. To produce a good cake, or trial, a good methodology is fundamental.