OpenPrescribing Hospitals Submission history: showing the gaps in hospital medicines data

Now we’ve told you that we’re working on OpenPrescribing Hospitals, and we’ve explained how organisations are handled within the SCMD, we’d like to explain the first feature we’re making available on the platform: Submission History.

As a reminder: OpenPrescribing Hospitals is designed to help healthcare professionals, researchers or members of the public who want to explore and analyse the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset (SCMD), which contains medicines usage data (based on stock control data) across different hospital trusts in England.

We have been busy developing the platform and we are still working hard to finalise our analyse and measures features (which will be very much like the popular openprescribing.net platform, which covers medicines prescribed in primary care in England). The screenshots we’re sharing here are from the beta version of the site - keep in mind that how it looks, works and functions might change in the coming months, as we keep iterating and improving.

What’s the problem?

Our blog series Organising Organisations showed that there are a few things that need to be surfaced before people start analysing the SCMD:

• NHS Trusts can change over time (e.g. mergers and acquisitions). There are variable patterns of data submissions around reorganisations.
• Not all NHS Trusts expected to be in the SCMD are.
• For NHS Trusts that are in the SCMD, their data can be incomplete and inconsistent.

This can result in errors in downstream analyses of the data.

The gaps in the data can be misleading

OpenPrescribing Hospitals uses the SCMD, which in turn relies on individual Trusts submitting their data to it. Sometimes, those submissions are incomplete, with bits of data missing. As someone using OpenPrescribing Hospitals to explore the data, this won’t be immediately obvious to you. So the Submission History page aims to help you quickly see whether there might be any data missing from analyses.

We added this feature as a direct result of our early discovery work, and after speaking with some potential users, who looked at the charts in OpenPrescribing Hospitals and noticed something sometimes wasn’t quite right.

They might see a chart like this, where the number of tablets issued within one NHS Trust appears to suddenly plummet to zero, then suddenly leap back up again:

To help people understand and explain these data gaps, we’ve developed the Submission History feature.

What problems does the Submission History Feature solve?

The Submission History page lets users see:

• All NHS Trusts included in the dataset over the entire period the dataset has been published.
• Understand relationships between NHS Trusts (e.g. mergers and acquisitions)
• What months individual NHS Trusts have submitted data for
• How much they submitted (number of different products)
• Whether the data are provisional vs finalised (we haven’t spoken about this yet, but we will explain what this means in an upcoming blog).

As an example, below is the submission history for the NHS Trust analysed above. In this chart we see a marked reduction in products issued at this particular trust during that time window.

An example of the submission history for two related NHS Trusts is shown below. This allows users to understand that that Bedford Hospital NHS Trust has been succeeded by Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust and that it stopped submitting data to the SCMD in April 2021.

We think this information will be useful for:

• Monitoring data submission compliance
• Tracking historical patterns
• Understanding organisational changes over time
• Identifying gaps in submissions
• Comparing data submissions across different organisations

We’d love your feedback

We’re keen to receive feedback on OpenPrescribing Hospitals - we depend on feedback to help make the service better. If you have any suggestions or feedback, or would like to be involved in the development of OpenPrescribing Hospitals, please send an email our way: bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk. You can also keep up with updates to OpenPrescribing.net or OpenPrescribing Hospitals by signing up to our newsletter.