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  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter Summer 2019

    New Feature! DM+D browser

    This week we have launched a new browser for the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices, better known as dm+d. dm+d is the standard dictionary for the medicines and devices used across the NHS. At last count there were over 150,000 packs of medicines and devices described. You can read more about the dm+d in [this detailed blog]/blog/2019/08/what-is-the-dm-d-the-nhs-dictionary-of-medicines-and-devices/).

    We have been using the dm+d browser internally for a while, and having found it very useful we believe it will come in handy for others too, so we have now made it available publicly for anyone to use. Read more about the tool here.

  5. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS dm+d browser — A New Feature on OpenPrescribing

    This week we have launched a new browser for the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices, better known as dm+d. dm+d is the standard dictionary for the medicines and devices used across the NHS. It contains codes and descriptions for all these medicines and devices; at last count there were over 150,000 packs of medicines and devices described. You can read more about the dm+d in this detailed blog.

    What is the dm+d browser?

    Our dm+d browser allows anyone to search and identify any product in the NHS. For example, you can see all the paracetamol products available in the dm+d here. We’ve previously written about how the dm+d can be useful, like using user-friendly names on the website, or identifying all dry powdered inhalers for analysis. As we have found our dm+d browser so useful, we believe others will find it useful too, and have now made it available publicly for anyone to use.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenCodelists

    What is the dm+d? The NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices

    Over the past year we have been increasingly using NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d). This blog post sets out to describe dm+d for the benefit of the wider prescribing analytics community and others.

    What is the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d)?

    dm+d is the standard dictionary for the medicines and devices used across the NHS. It contains standardised codes, descriptions, and metadata (such as price and pack size) for every entry. At last count it contained over 150,000 packs of medicines and devices.

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • Policy Insights

    UK Trials and Brexit — An Update

    Earlier this year we noticed a disturbing trend among UK trials registered on the EUCTR. The amount of newly approved and registered trials on the EUCTR dropped drastically following the 2016 Brexit vote. The chart from that blog post (from May 2019) is included below.

    When we reached out to the MHRA to ask about this, they stated that there was actually no decline in UK trials post-Brexit but rather administrative delays that kept trials from appearing on the public-facing EUCTR website. They noted this issue was being addressed and updates would be completed by the end of Q2 2019.

  8. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter June 2019

    New low-priority measures approved

    Yesterday (27 June), NHS England completed its consultation on an additional proposed set of products being considered for a recommendation against regular use in primary care. Therefore, on the site we have now included these new items in the set of low-priority measures. The newly added products include bath and shower emollients, higher cost insulin pen needles and dronedarone. See how your practice or CCG is performing on these measures here, or navigate to the Low Priority measures from your favourite organisation’s dashboard.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Additional Functions on Analyse page - multi-level searching and STP/NHS England regions

    Our technical team are busy improving how the engine room of OpenPrescribing. When they’ve finished we’ll get them to write a blog on exactly what they’ve done. In the meantime, as the work progresses we are able to add some additional exciting new features to the site.

    Multi-level analysis

    One of the limitations of how our Analyse page worked was the ability to only search at one BNF level at a time. For example, you couldn’t search for products and presentations together. However, now you are able to add any combinations you want, making this tool much more powerful. For example, it’s helpful when looking at broad-spectrum antibiotics: previously you could only include either cephalosporins and quinolones (BNF paragraphs), OR co-amoxiclav (a BNF chemical). Now you can include all of them at the same time.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Custom Organisation Groupings: OpenPrescribing Plan for Organisations like Primary Care Networks

    Update November 2019: Our NHS PCN dashboards are now live at https://openprescribing.net/pcn/ and you can read more on our launch blog.

    Update August 2019: Our amazing developers have written all the code necessary to display all prescribing measures and data for all PCNs in England on OpenPrescribing. Unfortunately there is no national list of PCNs and their membership available, as soon as this is published we will bring you our prescribing dashboards.

  11. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter May 2019

    Varied implementation of UTI prescribing guidelines

    One of our recent papers, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, highlighted variability in the speed at which different CCGs switched from prescribing trimethoprim to nitrofurantoin (as recommended by PHE for uncomplicated UTI).

    It appears that the practices which changed the most were in CCGs that had taken some action to promote the new guidelines, such as a change in formulary. What are the implications? Read more on this in our blog and you can of course see any region’s performance on this measure on OpenPrescribing.

  12. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    How can we improve the management of necessary changes in clinical practice?

    Just before Christmas we had a paper published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. It looked at how GP practices responded to changes to the guidance for antibiotics for urinary tract infections (UTIs).

    It’s an interesting story in itself, but we think that it prompts some wider questions about how GPs are helped to keep up-to-date on guidance on prescribing.

    What is the issue?

    For many years the mainstay of antibiotic treatment of uncomplicated UTIs in women has been trimethoprim. Recently there has been growing concern about the increasing levels of resistance (about a third of urine samples).

  13. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    All England Alerts : A New Feature on OpenPrescribing

    This week we have launched a new email alerting service that covers all of NHS England. Many users of OpenPrescribing already receive our monthly newsletter and our innovative email alert service for practice and CCG prescribing measures and for price concessions. We have now developed this service covering all of England based on user feedback. To sign up, just go to the All England page and enter your email address in the box beside the measures categories (see screenshot below).

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • Policy Insights

    UK Trials and Brexit

    We recently noticed a very dramatic drop in the number of UK clinical trials post-Brexit on the EU Clinical Trials Register (which would be a catastrophe for British science) and wrote to MHRA to get their view. It turns out that the drop is largely due to bad data management: this is worrying, but not the same thing as a drop in the number of UK clinical trials.

    The Short Story

    We’ve been conducting research on trends in clinical trials globally with one very striking recent finding: examining clinical trials on medicinal products, using the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR), the number of trials with a competent authority decision from the UK has fallen dramatically. As you can see on the graph below: from a long-term trend of around 150 new trials per quarter, after 2016 there is a rapid drop to fewer than 50, and now fewer than 10.

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Communicating variation in prescribing - Why We Use Deciles

    On OpenPrescribing.net we provide data for individual practices and CCGs (and now STPs and regions!) making it easier for everyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in England - supporting safer, more efficient prescribing. However, providing data for an individual location in isolation is rarely useful. We need to provide context, so that some sort of judgement can be made about whether the prescribing in question is especially high or low, and how extreme it is, in comparison with others. On OpenPrescribing we do this using deciles. We think providing transparency in our methods is really important, so in this blog I set out our rationale for doing so.

  16. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    Openness and Transparency: why is openness and transparency important for good data analysis and how does OpenPrescribing embody it?

    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. This blog sets out the steps we take with OpenPrescribing.net to ensure all our analysis and methodology is freely available for inspection, review, and importantly re-use, by anyone. We hope other teams will adopt these approaches so we can all collaborate to optimise analysis, generate insights and improve care for patients in the NHS.

  17. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS price concessions cost charities and local authorities an additional £5.6 million last year

    In the last year we estimate that price concessions have cost an additional £165 million in unplanned expenditure for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), and our OpenPrescribing.net price concession calculator was featured in a major BBC news story and in the Pharmaceutical Journal this week. However, interestingly, NHS price concessions do not just affect the NHS: they also represent unplanned expenditure for charities, local councils, and others. Here, we report our estimate of the impact on non-CCG organisations as an additional £5.6 million in 2018: a huge four-fold cost increase on top of expected prices for a sector that is already over-stretched.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS Regional and STP Dashboards — A new Feature on OpenPrescribing

    Today we launched NHS regional and STP dashboards on <OpenPrescribing.net>, which allow anyone to see NHS prescribing patterns across areas larger than CCGs. You can find these new dashboards under “Area and Practice Dashboards”.

    What is an NHS STP or Region?

    The NHS across England is now organised into Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) and NHS England regions. There are 44 STPs made up of NHS organisations such as CCGs and hospital trusts, and local councils, who developed shared proposals to improve health and social care, whilst ensuring services are joined up across all of the organisations they incorporate. STPs are contained within the five NHS England regional teams; these teams support healthcare commissioning and delivery in their area by providing professional leadership on finance, nursing, medical, specialised commissioning, patients and information, human resources, organisational development, assurance and delivery.