Who are you? An analysis of our OpenPrescribing users

One of the great things about working on OpenPrescribing is that we get lots of our users contacting us, asking questions, suggesting new measures or new tools, and telling us what they like (and don’t like) about the site. We’re very grateful to everyone who gets in touch, but know that this is just a small subset of the people who use the tool and subscribe to our monthly updates and newsletters. We’ve now analysed the data we have to get a better idea on what people use the site for, and who they are, and thought we’d write about what we’ve found.

Website traffic

To find out how many users of the site we have, where they come from, and what they look at, we use the web analytics tool Plausible.io.

In the 12 months to March 2024 we had over 225,000 unique visitors, 308,000 visits, and over 1.3 million page views.

Not surprisingly, most visitors to the site came from the United Kingdom (211,000, 93.7%) of which 188,000 were from England. The United States (4,000) and The Philippines (3,500) were a distant second and third. These may of course be due to people using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to access our site.

About half of these visitors come from directly typing www.openprescribing.net into the address bar, and nearly as many being directed from search engines such as Google or Bing. But over 9,500 people came to us in those 12 months through our email alert service. We were also really pleased to see that over 4,000 visitors came from the NHS e-learning for healthcare website.

Interestingly for us the highest viewed page was our Dictionary of Medicines + Devices (dm+d) browser, with nearly 150,000 page views. The second highest page (unsurprisingly) was our front page, followed by the analyse page, with over 75,000 views, and practice dashboards with over 45,000 views.

Email alerts

As well as looking at who our users were via Plausible Analytics, we were also interested to analyse what email alerts had been signed up to. In order to do this, we wanted to look at two things: which organisations were signed up, and which email domains they were being sent to. Consequently, we had to devise a way to preserve anonymity, and do analysis only on the domain, rather than the whole user email address. (An email domain is the part of the address after the @, e.g. nhs.net or gmail.com). (The next paragraph, shaded grey, is slightly nerdy, so please feel free to skip)

We wanted to extract the email addresses from our Django administration site. However, in order to preserve anonymity, we set the extract to use a asterisk format, e.g. r***********r@nhs.net. However, if two users had the same first and last letters and the same number of characters, it would not be possible to distinguish them as unique subscribers. Instead, we moved to a hashed system, where the email address is substituted for a unique alphanumeric code, e.g. EHAD3x3q24ho64v@nhs.net . This is always the same for each unique user, and never exposes the details of the person, but allows us to see the email domain.

As of April 2024 OpenPrescribing had 8,375 separate email signups, with the majority (6,926) being monthly alert emails, 314 price concession alerts, and the rest being analyse page alerts.

Alert Type	Practice	PCN	SICBL	ICB	Region	National	Unknown	Total
Analyse page alerts	267	43	704	53	66	0	2	1135
Monthly alerts	4489	941	1371	59	0	66	0	6926
Price Concession alerts	115	0	144	0	0	55	0	314
Total	4871	984	2219	112	66	121	2	8375

Not surprisingly, a majority (but by no means all) of our email subscribers come from the NHS. Out of 8,375 alerts, 6,250 (74.6%) were from NHS domains. We also found that a significant proportion of the remaining alerts were likely from non-corporate email domains, such as gmail or hotmail.

Organisation type	ac.uk	NHS	doctors.org.uk	gmail	gov.uk	hotmail	other	Total
Practice	21	3991	32	237	9	69	512	4871
PCN	2	860	0	13	6	8	95	984
SICBL	18	1252	4	142	22	47	734	2219
ICB	1	74	4	3	0	0	30	112
Region	4	7	0	6	0	4	45	66
National	1	65	0	7	0	1	47	121
Unknown	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	2
Total	47	6250	40	408	37	129	1464	8375

Which organisations sign up?

The majority of alerts are at practice and sub-ICB (formerly CCG) level. Looking across England, it’s interesting to see the variation in the proportion of practices that have at least one email alert subscription. I was pleased (and relieved) to see that there is high sign-up in Devon (where I work as a Chief Pharmacist in the ICB). I encourage the medicines optimisation team in my ICB to sign up to the OpenPrescribing measures email for the practices they are responsible for. I also ask the team to encourage GPs and PCN & practice pharmacists in those practices to do the same, as it allows them to more readily identify areas of variation and improvement. Percentage of practices with at least one practice signed up to email alerts at Sub-ICB and ICB level (except analyse alerts)

There is also wide variation in the number of alert and price concession email signups at both Sub-ICB and ICB level. The ICB numbers tend to be lower, as we don’t yet offer the same number of alerts as we do for Sub-ICBs. Number of email alerts at Sub-ICB and ICB (except analyse alerts)

Sign up to our free email alerts to keep you informed

We’ve got three types of email subscription, as well as our regular newsletter. Each of them lets you know about different things:

Monthly alerts. This is sent out when we update the prescribing data every month in OpenPrescribing. These email alerts help people keep track of their prescribing trends, alert you to changes in prescribing that may be difficult to spot and importantly tell you if your prescribing has changed in comparison to your peers. You can read more about the monthly alerts and find out how to sign up to them here. You can also read about the innovative methods we use to create the alerts in our paper in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

Price concession estimates. Every time a new price concession is announced, we produce a custom analysis, estimating how much more the medicines are going to cost your organisation. The email usually drops into your inbox within a few minutes of the changes being announced. You can read more on the tool and how to sign up, and find out how we’ve changed the calculations recently to make the estimates more accurate.

Analyse alert. This alert gives you information about a custom analysis you have created on our analyse page. Every time the data is updated, we’ll send you a link to let you know what’s happening with the analysis you have set up. Simply add your email address under the chart where it says “Get monthly alert emails with the latest version of this chart” to subscribe.

We’ve been busy showing our users how to get the most out of OpenPrescribing

This week we have finished a series of OpenPrescribing webinars. These have been aimed at different audiences, including ICB medicines optimisation teams, PCN/practice pharmacists, arms-lengths bodies, and ICB finance teams. Over 500 people have attended, and we hope that they have been useful. When we have reviewed the feedback, and collated all the questions we have, we’ll write about it here. We also hope to have seen an increase in the number of subscribers to our alerts!

Invite us to talk to you!

Don’t forget: if you want one of the OpenPrescribing team to talk to your practice, PCN, ICB, or other organisation about how OpenPrescribing can help you improve the use of medicines, we’d be delighted to do so. Just email us at feedback@openprescribing.net

And finally…

We talked above about how most of our users were from the UK, and specifically England. In total we had visits from 181 different countries, including unexpected places such as Vanuatu and South Sudan. These could well be blips on the tracking, or the use of VPNs, but we’re slightly intrigued!

Countries where users have visited OpenPrescribing.net in 12 months to 31st March 2024