OpenPrescribing Newsletter: Autumn 2024

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We are recruiting - come and work with us! 🚀

We have an exciting opportunity! We are recruiting a Clinical Informatician to work in the Open Analytics Unit. The unit is supporting NHS England to deliver interactive tools and services which support delivery of NHS primary care services and medicines to improve patient care.

Successful applicants will be working with OpenSAFELY and OpenPrescribing to turn clinical knowledge, information and guidelines into computer code to improve patient care through the better use of software and data science in health services.

Our current clinical informatics team includes pharmacists from ICBs, GP practice, and secondary care. You don’t have to be a pharmacist though, and we welcome applications from other professions. We can also offer secondments for those with NHS contracts!

Tell your friends and colleagues about this great opportunity. Applications close at 12:00 noon on Friday 22nd November. You can read more and find out how to apply here.

Best-value DOAC measure updated 💊

We’ve updated our Direct Oral Anticoagulant (DOAC) measure in OpenPrescribing to reflect NHS England commissioning recommendations for best-value DOACs. Our updated measure now shows the proportion of prescription items for DOACs not prescribed as generic apixaban or rivaroxaban tablets.

Hospital medicines data 🏥

There have been a number of developments to hospital medicines data over recent years. We’ve summarised these exciting developments in our latest blog, including the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset, patient-level high-cost drugs, and soon Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) data.

OpenPrescribing Webinars 🎓

We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who attended our recent OpenPrescribing webinars. It was fantastic to see so many of you there and to showcase some of the many features available on OpenPrescribing.

For those who couldn’t make it or for anyone who would like a refresher, video recordings from each webinar are now available.

In support of World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week 2024, we are hosting a special webinar on Monday 18th November to explore how OpenPrescribing measures and tools can support antimicrobial stewardship. See our blog for more information and to register.

An analysis of our OpenPrescribing users 👥

We’ve recently analysed our web traffic data and subscriber lists for the OpenPrescribing website. This has given us a better idea about who our users are, and how they might be using the website. See our blog post to read details of what we found.

OpenSAFELY News 🗞️

Since the start of the pandemic, much of the OpenPrescribing team have been building and researching in our powerful new OpenSAFELY platform for COVID-19 related research and service monitoring. You can read all our outputs on the website and our new OpenSAFELY reports website, but we think the following recent research publications will be of interest:

• The Use of Online Consultation Systems or Remote Consulting in England Characterized Through the Primary Care Health Records of 53 Million People in the OpenSAFELY Platform: Retrospective Cohort Study
• Impact of COVID-19 on recorded blood pressure screening and hypertension management in England