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  1. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter November 2019

    PCN Dashboards Now Live!

    We have now launched our long-awaited Primary Care Networks (PCNs) dashboard, made possible thanks to the the membership list being published by NHS England last week.

    We have PCN prescribing dashboards for every single NHS PCN and their member general practices. (Don’t know your PCN’s name? You can find it on your practice dashboard). This allows anyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in their PCN and how this compares to others across England — supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • Policy Insights

    Reporting Withdrawn Trials on the EUCTR

    Our EU TrialsTracker has been assessing compliance with EU trial reporting guidelines for over a year now. Our data has been used by Parliamentary Committees and trial sponsors to improve the reporting of clinical trials registered on the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR).

    We previously shared some of the data issues that make complete assessments of trials on the EUCTR difficult. One particularly troubling issue is dealing with trials that never began. Sometimes trials get all the necessary approvals to begin, and therefore are automatically registered on the EUCTR. In rare instances, and for any number of reasons, they then simply never begin; they are cancelled before they enroll a single participant or collect any data. Obviously, these trials have no results to report.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    High Dose Dexamethasone

    A guest blog from Calum Polwart (Twitter @ShinyBlackShoe)

    At the Bennett Institute we value openness and transparency as we believe open discussion of ideas and methods are the key ingredients for high quality data analysis. We think it is unhelpful that so much NHS data analysis is outsourced, or done behind closed doors, as this prevents coalface clinicians from engaging with data and sharing their expertise and insights. We build OpenPrescribing.net, not just for ourselves, but for anyone to explore NHS prescribing data. This democratisation of prescribing data removes gatekeepers and barriers to accessing the data, allows anyone to scrutinise prescribing and produces new insights.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Primary Care Networks (PCN) Dashboards — A new prescribing dashboard on OpenPrescribing

    Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our Primary Care Networks (PCNs) dashboard. We have PCN prescribing dashboards available for every single NHS PCN and their member general practices. This allows anyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in their PCN and see how this compares to other PCNs across England — supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.

    Figure 1: South Islington PCN OpenPrescribing Dashboard

    Figure 1: South Islington PCN OpenPrescribing Dashboard

    What are NHS PCNs?

    PCNs are groups of practices, which together serve communities of around 30,000-50,000 people, with the aim of improving care for patients. PCNs were announced as part of the NHS long term plan and many PCNs have formed already and started to recruit staff such as clinical directors and clinical pharmacists to improve and optimise the use of medicines. We hope our PCN prescribing dashboards will assist everyone across the country to identify and prioritise areas where prescribing can be improved.

  5. Posted
    Categories
    • Policy Insights

    Science and Technology Select Committee Follows-Up on Trials Transparency

    Last week, the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee convened an inquiry following-up their previous clinical trials transparency efforts. The Select Committee has been very active in the trials transparency space over the past two years. Earlier this year they sent letters to every public university and NHS trust in the UK that sponsors clinical trials on the EU register. These letters reminded sponsors of their trial reporting responsibilities and provided them with reporting performance figures based on data from our EU TrialsTracker.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter October 2019

    New Paper in BMJ

    Our newest paper is now out in the BMJ! Here we show huge variation in adoption of warranted changes in prescribing behaviour, using some exciting new openly available change detection methods.

    New measures

    We now have over 80 measures!

    This month we have launched a range of new measures. As always, measures are prioritised on your dashboard by potential for improvement so you can quickly and easily spot where your organisation is an outlier. You can also sort by potential savings or group measures by clinical condition.

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 3

    This is the third instalment in our series of commentaries on using reference ranges to interpret pathology test results.

    Reference ranges vary between labs

    Classically, the reference range is defined statistically: it is the interval within which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. Therefore 2.5% of the time, healthy people will have (for example) haemoglobin concentrations less than the lower limit, and 2.5% of the time it will be over the upper limit. (Read more in our previous blog).

  8. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 2

    This is the second installment in our series of commentaries on reference ranges used to interpret pathology test results. Here we describe two issues relating to how meaningful reference ranges are.

    Reference ranges are usually indicators of statistical outliers in a healthy reference population

    The most common type of reference range is defined as the interval between which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. In other words, 2.5% of the time, healthy people will have haemoglobin concentrations less than the lower limit.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 1

    As the OpenPathology project has progressed, we have started to build measures to describe variation between practices, and groups of practices.

    While comparing rates of requests per head of population can be used as a simple measure of possible over- or under-use of tests compared to other practices, it doesn’t take into account the general health needs of the population, so it can be difficult to rule out warranted variation. Therefore, comparing variation in rates of abnormal results is another useful measure to consider.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: fake seasonality in potassium results — dangerous and avoidable

    In our initial analyses of pathology data from the South West for our OpenPathology.net project, there is a pronounced (sometimes extreme) increase in high potassium results during the winter months, and a corresponding increase in low-potassium results in summer:

    What’s causing it?

    The level of potassium in plasma within a blood sample is affected by temperature. Potassium can move into and out of blood cells during storage: in cooler temperatures, potassium diffuses out of cells into plasma, leading to the reading being artefactually higher, while in higher temperatures an enzyme works to pump potassium into the cells.

  11. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Seasonality in Haemoglobin test results

    In our initial analyses of pathology data from the South West for our OpenPathology.net project, we have noticed subtle but consistent variation in haemoglobin test results throughout the year. Haemoglobin (Hb) levels falling below certain threshold values typically give a diagnosis of anaemia.

    In the following regional sample we see that the mean Hb concentration across both males and females differs by 2-3 g/l between the summer low and the winter peak:

  12. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    New Measure — Inhalers and the Environment

    At the Bennett Institute we regularly collaborate on projects, both small and large, with users who get in touch. For development of this measure we would like to thank the NHS England Sustainable Unit and Centre for Sustainable Healthcare for their input on our work to support the NHS Long Term Plan. Another one of our collaborators on this work is Nicola Read, a respiratory doctor who is currently one of the National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellows. Below we set our new measure on inhalers and the environment and Nicola explains its importance for all inhaler prescribers.

  13. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    New Measure: Seven Day Prescribing for Long-term Conditions

    This week we launched a new measure of seven day prescription for medicines used to treat long-term conditions. There is no current consensus on duration of prescription across the NHS and prescribers are advised that they should write a prescription for a duration that is clinically appropriate. For medicines that are for stable long-term conditions many areas have policies in place recommending one, two, or three month prescriptions.

    What are Medicines Compliance Aids?

    Medicines Compliance Aids (MCAs), sometimes known as dosette boxes or pill organisers, are plastic boxes with small compartments that show which pills need to be taken at what time of day. The British Medical Association reports growing requests to prescribe seven day quantities of medicines to fund supply of medicine compliance aids (MCAs). We propose this measure of seven day prescriptions for long-term conditions as a surrogate measure for MCAs.

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Zuclopenthixol Acetate: a new kind of measure on OpenPrescribing

    Zuclopenthixol is an antipsychotic used for schizophrenia and other psychoses. In the UK, there are two injectable forms of zuclopenthixol:

    • zuclopenthixol acetate : a short acting treatment used for acute episodes
    • zuclopenthixol decanoate : a long acting treatment used for maintenance

    This week we launched a new measure to support a new type of alert to identify any prescriptions of zuclopenthixol acetate for further investigation. It is not recommended to be prescribed in primary care, so prescriptions may have been prescribed in error.

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter September 2019

    New Feature! Measures linked to Analyse page

    Following many requests from users, we have created links from our measures to the corresponding search on the Analyse page. This is particularly useful if you want to see multiple practices or CCGs on one chart, view the results on a map, or see exactly which products are included in the measure.

    You will notice this is not yet available for all of our measures (which now number close to 100), due to the complex way some measures are constructed. This currently affects just 12 of our standard measures and 4 of the Low-Priority prescribing measures, and we hope to keep increasing the options in the coming months.

  16. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: getting population sizes right

    At OpenPathology, we’ve already found interesting variation in test request rates between practices, but we’d also like to compare whole laboratories.

    The number of tests per patient is an important measure for understanding variation in test requesting across the country. For example, the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) initiative uses this measurement to shine a light on clinically important variation and promote improvements in cost-effective care.

    For GIRFT, laboratories in England were asked to provide an estimate of their primary care populations. North Devon reported this as 160,000 patients, and Cornwall reported 473,637.

  17. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    Validating pathology data against known shifts in clinical practice

    OpenPathology is our project exploring and feeding back to clinicians on their test requesting rates.

    Having established that patient counts are subject to some inaccuracy in existing analyses (see our previous blog), it’s important to sense check the accuracy of our own list size data.

    Because two members of our OpenPathology team are also clinicians in North Devon, we have the opportunity to compare our data with known changes in practice.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    Examining variation in test request rates

    We are excited to reveal some of the data for our new OpenPathology.net project. Similar to our previous project for NHS prescribing data openprescribing.net, we are developing free, open dashboards for analysing NHS pathology data. So far we have data from two laboratories (North Devon and Cornwall), and have started to analyse it.

    What have we found so far?

    Lots. This blog post is one in a series highlighting some initial insights we have noted.