Special edition: OpenPrescribing Hospitals is available now

In this special edition of the OpenPrescribing newsletter, Vicky, one of our clinical informaticians at the Bennett Institute, introduces our newest tool, OpenPrescribing Hospitals.

What is OpenPrescribing Hospitals?

OpenPrescribing Hospitals is an openly available platform to make analysing data for medicines issued in hospitals in England easier.

Why now?

Since launching OpenPrescribing in 2015 we’ve wanted to do the same for medicines used in hospitals. Unlike primary care, where the English Prescribing Dataset has been openly available for a long time (around 15 years!), secondary care medicines use data but has only recently been made available. The Secondary Care Medicines Dataset was first made available in August 2020. Our attention was diverted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but for the last 12 months, and with the support of NHS England Primary Care and Medicines Analytics Unit, we have been able to spend time learning about the data, building a platform, and starting to gather feedback. We have written more about how we got started in a series of blogs.

Secondary Care Medicines Dataset

OpenPrescribing Hospitals is ‘built on’ the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset (SCMD). The SCMD is collated by Rx-Info and published by the NHSBSA on the Open Data Portal. This dataset provides processed pharmacy stock control data on medicines issued in all NHS acute, teaching, specialist, mental health and community trusts in England. Importantly, there is no patient level data or indications within the SCMD and the quantities refer to stock issued rather than prescriptions for individual patients. You can read more about the SCMD and stock control data on our blog.

Features Features Features

There are three main features on the OpenPrescribing Hospitals platform.

We based the measures and custom analysis features on OpenPrescribing as we know our users in primary care value and use these tools. The unexpected addition was the Submission History feature.

Submission history

Using the submission history feature users can view the data submission history for each NHS Trust in England over time and identify gaps in reporting. We didn’t plan to build the Submission History feature at the start. However, during data discovery work and after speaking to early users, it quickly became clear we needed to surface where data might be missing. We’ve written more about the Submission History Feature, and about how we set about Organising Organisations in a blog series all of its own.

In the example below, we show the Submission History for trusts in the Black Country ICB.

Custom Analyses

Similar to OpenPrescribing.net we want to give users the opportunity to build custom analyses for the products they are interested in and hospital trusts they care about.

In the example below you can see the volume of edoxaban 60mg tablets issued in three different hospital trusts between 2019 and 2025.

For now, only a single product is selectable in the custom analyse feature. We plan to release and gather feedback on a multi-product analyse feature soon!

Measures

We have built a measures feature very much like OpenPrescribing. Measures can be used to identify opportunities for improvement by considering trends over time, variation between organisations and deviation from best practice standards.

We have written a blog about our approach to measures in OpenPrescribing Hospitals.

Here are our first six measures in OpenPrescribing Hospitals. We based our first measures on Medicines Optimisation Opportunities and measures that already existed in OpenPrescribing.net.

Measures are presented using percentile charts. We have written a blog about highlighting variation and why we have chosen to use percentile charts on OpenPrescribing Hospitals as well as OpenPrescribing.net.

Just as with OpenPrescribing.net we use the principle of lower is better.

In the example below, you can see a percentile chart showing DOACs issued which are not rivaroxaban or apixaban tablets based on the NHS England commissioning recommendations for DOACs. Here, four hospital trusts are plotted. Using the example below, Calderdale and Huddersfield have a consistently lower proportion of DOACs not prescribed as apixaban or rivaroxaban.

What’s next?

Over the next six months we are going to gather more user feedback. The success of OpenPrescribing.net in primary care is down to the people that use it, telling us what they want to see and do!

In particular, we will be focusing on new measures. Are there any audit standards or guidance that you would like automated as a measure? We want to hear from you. Please share any comments or feedback with us via email. We would also be happy to join short calls, team meetings etc if you would prefer to give feedback in this manner.