What Are the Top 10 Most Frequently Recorded Clinical Codes in NHS GP Records
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Introduction
OpenCodeCounts is an open-access, online interactive tool and an accompanying R package. It allows users to explore the English national clinical coding data captured in NHS-funded GP practices and admissions to acute hospitals. It visualises and analyses how frequently clinical codes have been recorded each year since 2011. Users can search for individually entered codes or groups of codes, or any codelist you have created or found on OpenCodelists.
The underlying data set provided openly by NHS England. Over the last year there were 158,567 selected codes, representing a total of 6,139,627,945 recorded events.
In this blog post we take a quick look at the top 10 most used codes across general practice in England.
Top 10 SNOMED CT clinical codes in NHS General Practice
Across nearly 6 billion recorded events the most commonly used code is the one to represent the sending of a humble text message between the general practice and a patient. This far exceeds the next most common event which is a code commonly used to record someone’s phone number. In fact four of the top 10 all relate to communication about a person’s records in some way. The full top 10 is in the table below the summary.
The next most commonly recorded codes relate to patient characteristics that are very commonly recorded as part of consultations. Blood pressure recordings were recorded approximately 141 million times in the last year (both systolic and diastolic readings). Blood pressure is denoted by two numbers e.g. 120/80, systolic pressure over diastolic pressure and both make an appearance with body mass index(recorded 51 million times), a reflection of somebody’s weight recorded 49 million times. Finally the rest of the top 10 is made up of common blood tests used for diagnosis and routine monitoring - creatinine and sodium.
Summary
Across around 6 billion codes the Top 10 most used codes make up about 20% of all codes used in general practice. This data provides a snapshot into the daily lives of patients and clinicians in general practice every day. We are grateful to NHS England for making this data available as it supports OpenCodeCounts providing this data to researchers and analysts working to support the NHS deliver care for patients. Feel free to head over to OpenCodeCounts to look at time periods or specific clinical codes you are interested in.
Top 10 Codes Used in 2024/25
| Rank | Code | Description | Usage Count | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 279991000000102 | Short message service text message sent to patient (procedure) | 427,336,750 | 6.960% |
| 2 | 184103008 | Patient telephone number (observable entity) | 277,158,090 | 4.514% |
| 3 | 423876004 | Clinical document (record artifact) | 88,284,520 | 1.438% |
| 4 | 72313002 | Systolic arterial pressure (observable entity) | 70,592,440 | 1.150% |
| 5 | 1091811000000102 | Diastolic arterial pressure (observable entity) | 70,557,150 | 1.149% |
| 6 | 1068881000000101 | eConsultation via online application (procedure) | 61,730,940 | 1.005% |
| 7 | 60621009 | Body mass index (observable entity) | 50,833,680 | 0.828% |
| 8 | 1000731000000107 | Serum creatinine level (observable entity) | 50,211,460 | 0.818% |
| 9 | 27113001 | Body weight (observable entity) | 48,929,750 | 0.797% |
| 10 | 1000661000000107 | Serum sodium level (observable entity) | 48,294,630 | 0.787% |