See Data on the Individual Drugs in our Prescribing Measures

Today we launch another new feature on OpenPrescribing. As you will probably know, we have various standard prescribing measures which show how a practice or CCG is prescribing in comparison with their peers. These are presented as percentages or rates, and often the maths is very simple: what is the proportion of “undesirable drug” divided by “all drugs in that class”. But sometimes there are lots of drugs in the “numerator”, the top half of the equation. For these measures, if a practice is doing badly, we wanted it to be easy for everyone to see exactly which drugs are contributing to that score.

So, from today, GP Practices and CCGs now can quickly see the data on which drugs are being prescribed, and identify what is causing the variation, helping them to make improvements to their prescribing.

To access this feature, you can visit any CCG or GP dashboard and click on the link under any of our prescribing measures.

Clicking this link takes you to a page showing you which presentations of a drug are contributing to the variation for the GP Practice or CCG selected. This table shows you the items prescribed under the numerator for the measures, letting you see the quantity and cost of the drugs prescribed.

We’ve added this feature following requests from our users - we always welcome feedback and suggestions, so get in touch!

You can sign up to our new mailing list to receive news and updates from the OpenPrescribing team, sign up to alerts on any page to get an “early-warning” email when a practice or CCG starts to drift into potentially poorer prescribing, and follow us on Twitter to be the first to hear when we add new features or upload the latest month’s data to the site.