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  1. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    'Low Value' Prescription Items

    Today NHS England announced it is reviewing the prescribing of medicines which it deems to be “ineffective, unnecessary [and] inappropriate for prescription on the NHS”.

    We make no comment here on whether it is a good or a bad idea for the NHS to stop prescribing these items. We are keen that everyone in the NHS should use data better, to help understand who is prescribing what, and below we show how you can use OpenPrescribing to investigate the prescribing of these items in your area.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing E-mail Alerts

    We launched our e-mail alerts on OpenPrescribing to help people keep track of prescribing trends at their GP Practice or CCG. Our alerts send you a monthly e-mail highlighting any new signals in our prescribing measures (including the new measures we launched this month!). This will help you keep track of changes in prescribing, as our alerts can help you find changes that might otherwise be difficult to spot by eye.

    You can sign up to receive alerts for any GP Practice or CCG in England by going to the dashboards and entering your e-mail address. We will then send you monthly updates tailored for the practice or CCG you are interested in.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing - new measures now available

    We’ve been spending some time at OpenPrescribing designing a set of new measures to identify interesting variations in prescribing behaviour across the country.

    We’ve talked to people from CCGs, and have looked (via Freedom of Information requests) at a number of CCG schemes for improving prescribing, and have come up with a number of areas that we think are important.

    Some, like the opioids measure, are important for both cost and clinical reasons. Others, such as the glaucoma measure, show where there is prescribing by brand, which we don’t think is necessary. We also have measures, like generic diltiazem, which show where we think there is prescribing which doesn’t meet national guidance on how they should be prescribed.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing - TARGET Antibiotic webinar

    OpenPrescribing was featured in a recent TARGET antibiotic webinar, which shows how you can use the site to explore antibiotic prescribing in your local CCG or GP practice. It looks at the antibiotic measures featured on our CCG & GP practice dashboards, and how to construct your own queries on the Analyse page.

    The webinar demonstrates a range of tools that can be used to take an in depth look at antibiotics - and OpenPrescribing is featured from 5:30. If you want to have a go at using the Analyse page yourself (to look for antibiotics or any other drug!) we’ve written some guidance here.

  5. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Bennett Institute 2016 Round-Up

    In our first full year of existence we’ve grown fast, recruiting lots of new staff. You can see us all on our new website: Lydia our project manager started in the Spring, as did Seb, our new coder; Lisa, our community engagement manager, started over the summer; Helen, our new researcher, started in December, with two more researchers starting in January. For our OpenPrescribing work we’ve been joined by Richard as our pharmaceutical advisor. We’ve also been lucky enough to pull in a huge team of excellent students including Jess, Sarah, Mark, and the mighty COMPare project team of Henry, Aaron, Ioan, Philip, and Eirion. We’ve now delivered some of our early projects, and have a nice portfolio of papers submitted already.

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    How to run user testing, and what we learned from doing it on OpenPrescribing

    How do you know if your product is really working for users? You can guess, you can ask them, or best of all, you can watch them actually using it.

    With OpenPrescribing, we want to make it easier for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to monitor prescribing behaviour, and for GPs to prescribe in the best way. So it’s important that it really does help those users do those things. And the only way to verify that is with user research.