OpenPrescribing Newsletter: December 2017

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.

New: Pregabalin measure based on milligrams

Pregabalin has been much in the news recently (see the story below), and the price has been subject to significant change. We were asked by a CCG (via feedback@openprescribing.net) whether there was another way of measuring the amount of pregabalin being prescribed, and we’ve come up with a measure using the total milligrams of pregabalin prescribed every month per 1000 patients.

Improved: measure breakdown

Did you know that you can see greater detail on all of the practice and CCG measures? If you click on “break the overall score down into individual presentations” on a measure it will take you to a page listing all the data for the numerator of that measure.

We have now improved this list - instead of showing you the data for the latest month, it will now show the data for the latest three months. This smooths the data nicely to iron out any odd monthly blips. It also means that you can more easily see items that are only prescribed infrequently, but have an impact on that measure.

Behind the scenes!

We are working on some exciting new data science techniques to identify unusual prescribing in practices, “hypothesis blind”. We’ll be launching our experimental new “Labs” page for each practice and CCG shortly, and inviting people to tell us if they think we are correctly identifying odd prescribing behaviour.

Prescribing data update

We’ve updated OpenPrescribing with September’s data. Head over to OpenPrescribing to see more.