Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

9 Oct 2019

New Measure: Seven Day Prescribing for Long-term Conditions

This week we launched a new measure of seven day prescription for medicines used to treat long-term conditions. There is no current consensus on duration of prescription across the NHS and prescribers are advised that they should write a prescription for a duration that is clinically appropriate. For medicines that are for stable long-term conditions many areas have policies in place recommending one, two, or three month prescriptions. What are Medicines Compliance Aids?

9 Oct 2019

Zuclopenthixol Acetate: a new kind of measure on OpenPrescribing

Zuclopenthixol is an antipsychotic used for schizophrenia and other psychoses. In the UK, there are two injectable forms of zuclopenthixol: zuclopenthixol acetate : a short acting treatment used for acute episodes zuclopenthixol decanoate : a long acting treatment used for maintenance This week we launched a new measure to support a new type of alert to identify any prescriptions of zuclopenthixol acetate for further investigation. It is not recommended to be prescribed in primary care, so prescriptions may have been prescribed in error.

26 Sep 2019

OpenPrescribing Newsletter September 2019

New Feature! Measures linked to Analyse page Following many requests from users, we have created links from our measures to the corresponding search on the Analyse page. This is particularly useful if you want to see multiple practices or CCGs on one chart, view the results on a map, or see exactly which products are included in the measure. You will notice this is not yet available for all of our measures (which now number close to 100), due to the complex way some measures are constructed.

18 Sep 2019

OpenPathology: getting population sizes right

At OpenPathology, we’ve already found interesting variation in test request rates between practices, but we’d also like to compare whole laboratories. The number of tests per patient is an important measure for understanding variation in test requesting across the country. For example, the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) initiative uses this measurement to shine a light on clinically important variation and promote improvements in cost-effective care. For GIRFT, laboratories in England were asked to provide an estimate of their primary care populations.

9 Sep 2019

Validating pathology data against known shifts in clinical practice

OpenPathology is our project exploring and feeding back to clinicians on their test requesting rates. Having established that patient counts are subject to some inaccuracy in existing analyses (see our previous blog), it’s important to sense check the accuracy of our own list size data. Because two members of our OpenPathology team are also clinicians in North Devon, we have the opportunity to compare our data with known changes in practice.

5 Sep 2019

Examining variation in test request rates

We are excited to reveal some of the data for our new OpenPathology.net project. Similar to our previous project for NHS prescribing data openprescribing.net, we are developing free, open dashboards for analysing NHS pathology data. So far we have data from two laboratories (North Devon and Cornwall), and have started to analyse it. What have we found so far? Lots. This blog post is one in a series highlighting some initial insights we have noted.

29 Aug 2019

OpenPrescribing Newsletter Summer 2019

New Feature! DM+D browser This week we have launched a new browser for the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices, better known as dm+d. dm+d is the standard dictionary for the medicines and devices used across the NHS. At last count there were over 150,000 packs of medicines and devices described. You can read more about the dm+d in [this detailed blog]/blog/2019/08/what-is-the-dm-d-the-nhs-dictionary-of-medicines-and-devices/). We have been using the dm+d browser internally for a while, and having found it very useful we believe it will come in handy for others too, so we have now made it available publicly for anyone to use.

27 Aug 2019

NHS dm+d browser — A New Feature on OpenPrescribing

This week we have launched a new browser for the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices, better known as dm+d. dm+d is the standard dictionary for the medicines and devices used across the NHS. It contains codes and descriptions for all these medicines and devices; at last count there were over 150,000 packs of medicines and devices described. You can read more about the dm+d in this detailed blog. What is the dm+d browser?

27 Aug 2019

What is the dm+d? The NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices

Over the past year we have been increasingly using NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d). This blog post sets out to describe dm+d for the benefit of the wider prescribing analytics community and others. What is the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d)? dm+d is the standard dictionary for the medicines and devices used across the NHS. It contains standardised codes, descriptions, and metadata (such as price and pack size) for every entry.

21 Aug 2019

UK Trials and Brexit — An Update

Earlier this year we noticed a disturbing trend among UK trials registered on the EUCTR. The amount of newly approved and registered trials on the EUCTR dropped drastically following the 2016 Brexit vote. The chart from that blog post (from May 2019) is included below. When we reached out to the MHRA to ask about this, they stated that there was actually no decline in UK trials post-Brexit but rather administrative delays that kept trials from appearing on the public-facing EUCTR website.

1 Jul 2019

OpenPrescribing Newsletter June 2019

New low-priority measures approved Yesterday (27 June), NHS England completed its consultation on an additional proposed set of products being considered for a recommendation against regular use in primary care. Therefore, on the site we have now included these new items in the set of low-priority measures. The newly added products include bath and shower emollients, higher cost insulin pen needles and dronedarone. See how your practice or CCG is performing on these measures here, or navigate to the Low Priority measures from your favourite organisation’s dashboard.

27 Jun 2019

Additional Functions on Analyse page - multi-level searching and STP/NHS England regions

Our technical team are busy improving how the engine room of OpenPrescribing. When they’ve finished we’ll get them to write a blog on exactly what they’ve done. In the meantime, as the work progresses we are able to add some additional exciting new features to the site. Multi-level analysis One of the limitations of how our Analyse page worked was the ability to only search at one BNF level at a time.

24 Jun 2019

Custom Organisation Groupings: OpenPrescribing Plan for Organisations like Primary Care Networks

Update November 2019: Our NHS PCN dashboards are now live at https://openprescribing.net/pcn/ and you can read more on our launch blog. Update August 2019: Our amazing developers have written all the code necessary to display all prescribing measures and data for all PCNs in England on OpenPrescribing. Unfortunately there is no national list of PCNs and their membership available, as soon as this is published we will bring you our prescribing dashboards.

7 Jun 2019

OpenPrescribing Newsletter May 2019

Varied implementation of UTI prescribing guidelines One of our recent papers, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, highlighted variability in the speed at which different CCGs switched from prescribing trimethoprim to nitrofurantoin (as recommended by PHE for uncomplicated UTI). It appears that the practices which changed the most were in CCGs that had taken some action to promote the new guidelines, such as a change in formulary. What are the implications?

31 May 2019

How can we improve the management of necessary changes in clinical practice?

Just before Christmas we had a paper published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. It looked at how GP practices responded to changes to the guidance for antibiotics for urinary tract infections (UTIs). It’s an interesting story in itself, but we think that it prompts some wider questions about how GPs are helped to keep up-to-date on guidance on prescribing. What is the issue? For many years the mainstay of antibiotic treatment of uncomplicated UTIs in women has been trimethoprim.

13 May 2019

All England Alerts : A New Feature on OpenPrescribing

This week we have launched a new email alerting service that covers all of NHS England. Many users of OpenPrescribing already receive our monthly newsletter and our innovative email alert service for practice and CCG prescribing measures and for price concessions. We have now developed this service covering all of England based on user feedback. To sign up, just go to the All England page and enter your email address in the box beside the measures categories (see screenshot below).

13 May 2019

UK Trials and Brexit

We recently noticed a very dramatic drop in the number of UK clinical trials post-Brexit on the EU Clinical Trials Register (which would be a catastrophe for British science) and wrote to MHRA to get their view. It turns out that the drop is largely due to bad data management: this is worrying, but not the same thing as a drop in the number of UK clinical trials. The Short Story We’ve been conducting research on trends in clinical trials globally with one very striking recent finding: examining clinical trials on medicinal products, using the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR), the number of trials with a competent authority decision from the UK has fallen dramatically.

24 Apr 2019

Communicating variation in prescribing - Why We Use Deciles

On OpenPrescribing.net we provide data for individual practices and CCGs (and now STPs and regions!) making it easier for everyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in England - supporting safer, more efficient prescribing. However, providing data for an individual location in isolation is rarely useful. We need to provide context, so that some sort of judgement can be made about whether the prescribing in question is especially high or low, and how extreme it is, in comparison with others.