Prescribing Data: BNF Codes

OpenPrescribing takes open datasets from NHS Digital and NHS Business Services Authority, and makes it easy for people to explore the prescribing dataset. We also use this dataset in our research, and offer bespoke data extracts from the prescribing dataset for researchers, clinicians and NHS staff (get in touch!). In this series of blog posts we’ll explain key concepts and share our knowledge of the prescribing dataset. In the first blog, we take a look at BNF codes.

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'Low Value' Prescription Items

Today NHS England announced it is reviewing the prescribing of medicines which it deems to be “ineffective, unnecessary [and] inappropriate for prescription on the NHS”. We make no comment here on whether it is a good or a bad idea for the NHS to stop prescribing these items. We are keen that everyone in the NHS should use data better, to help understand who is prescribing what, and below we show how you can use OpenPrescribing to investigate the prescribing of these items in your area.

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OpenPrescribing E-mail Alerts

We launched our e-mail alerts on OpenPrescribing to help people keep track of prescribing trends at their GP Practice or CCG. Our alerts send you a monthly e-mail highlighting any new signals in our prescribing measures (including the new measures we launched this month!). This will help you keep track of changes in prescribing, as our alerts can help you find changes that might otherwise be difficult to spot by eye.

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OpenPrescribing - new measures now available

We’ve been spending some time at OpenPrescribing designing a set of new measures to identify interesting variations in prescribing behaviour across the country. We’ve talked to people from CCGs, and have looked (via Freedom of Information requests) at a number of CCG schemes for improving prescribing, and have come up with a number of areas that we think are important. Some, like the opioids measure, are important for both cost and clinical reasons.

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OpenPrescribing - TARGET Antibiotic webinar

OpenPrescribing was featured in a recent TARGET antibiotic webinar, which shows how you can use the site to explore antibiotic prescribing in your local CCG or GP practice. It looks at the antibiotic measures featured on our CCG & GP practice dashboards, and how to construct your own queries on the Analyse page. The webinar demonstrates a range of tools that can be used to take an in depth look at antibiotics - and OpenPrescribing is featured from 5:30.

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Bennett Institute 2016 Round-Up

In our first full year of existence we’ve grown fast, recruiting lots of new staff. You can see us all on our new website: Lydia our project manager started in the Spring, as did Seb, our new coder; Lisa, our community engagement manager, started over the summer; Helen, our new researcher, started in December, with two more researchers starting in January. For our OpenPrescribing work we’ve been joined by Richard as our pharmaceutical advisor.

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TrialsTracker

This repository contains all the analysis and front-end code for trialstracker.ebmdatalab.net which is a simple application that tracks major trial sponsors with unreported trials on ClinicalTrials.gov.

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How to run user testing, and what we learned from doing it on OpenPrescribing

How do you know if your product is really working for users? You can guess, you can ask them, or best of all, you can watch them actually using it. With OpenPrescribing, we want to make it easier for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to monitor prescribing behaviour, and for GPs to prescribe in the best way. So it’s important that it really does help those users do those things. And the only way to verify that is with user research.

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