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Blog series: Ghost Branded Generics

Blog posts in the series Ghost Branded Generics

  1. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Ghost branded generics: Why does the cost of generic atorvastatin vary?

    This a very nerdy story about a problem that costs the NHS £11.6m a year. It shows how one small design choice in the software GPs use can have huge ramifications for how we prescribe, and a huge cost impact on the NHS. More than that, it shows how problems like these can only be spotted, and addressed, by mixed teams like ours — doctors, pharmacists, researchers and software engineers — pooling our different skills to build tools and papers.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Ghost Branded Generics: A new dashboard on OpenPrescribing

    Before Christmas we wrote a nerdy story about Ghost Branded Generics, a problem that costs the NHS £11.6m a year due to prescribers selecting specific manufacturer’s products rather than true generics. This is largely avoidable. Today we launch our Ghost Branded Generics dashboard for every practice and CCG in the country. This can be accessed through every dashboard page (example below) and we think it will be useful to help people change prescriptions from Ghost Branded Generics to true generic prescriptions.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Ghost Branded Generics - Positive News!

    Before Christmas we wrote about Ghost Branded Generics, a very nerdy story about a problem we uncovered that costs the NHS………£11.6million a year. Since then we have launched a freely accessible Ghost Branded Generics dashboard on Openprescribing.net for every practice and CCG in the country; and a Ghost Branded Generics measure so practices and CCGs can track their prescribing of Ghost Branded Generics over time.

    We have also had lots of people get in touch about this whole new category of NHS savings. In particular we were contacted by TPP who produce SystmOne, the “electronic health record” (EHR) system used by approximately 40% of GPs in England.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Ghost Branded Generics - How to fix it

    Ghost Branded Generics are a relatively new category of cost-saving opportunities, caused by prescribers specifying a manufacturer for a generic product, often resulting in a higher reimbursement price compared to the true generic. We estimate the problem costs the NHS £11.6m a year. We have written about this extensively since our first blog on discovering the issue and developed a Ghost Branded Generics dashboard and measure for every practice and CCG in England.