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How I use OpenPrescribing in my practice as a GP
A guest blog from Dr. Kevin Barrett (Twitter @DrKBarrett).
Last week the British Journal of General Practice published our paper on unsafe prescribing of methotrexate. As part of the publication Dr. Kevin Barrett talked to BJGP (see video below) about how he used OpenPrescribing to identify potentially unsafe prescribing in his practice and has also written a short blog below.
When I first started as a GP trainee in 1999 electronic prescribing was a relatively recent innovation. The practice formulary was built by hand, and prescribing analysis only occurred when paper Prescribing Analysis and CosT (PACT) reports were sent to the practice. These evolved into ePACT reports, but these still required time to decipher. With the advent of Primary Care Trust (PCT) and then Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) employed pharmacists who had the time to analyse the data and present practice- and prescriber-level data to us at a range of meetings we became used to comparing our prescribing data to our peers. Electronic prescribing aids are a useful measure to help guide our prescribing and keep us up to date with the ever-changing local and national recommendations.