OpenPrescribing Hospitals - now live, and open for your feedback

Back in January, we described our plans for OpenPrescribing Hospitals, a service that lets you explore publicly available hospital medicines data from NHS trusts in England. And as promised, it’s live now. You can try it out at openprescribing.net/hospitals.

We opened up the website to all today, with one primary feature available - viewing submission histories. As we explained in another recent post, the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset is public data covering stock control in hospital pharmacies. OpenPrescribing Hospitals makes it easy to explore and analyse that data. Sometimes there are odd gaps in the data, and those gaps can be misleading. The submission history feature (which you can read more about here) lets you quickly spot the gaps, and in some cases it might explain why the gaps exist in the first place.

What you see today is a beta - an early version designed for testing and feedback. It’s not finished yet, but gathering feedback is a vital part of making it better.

So, please keep in mind:

• We’ll add new features in the next couple of months - stay tuned for updates
• Your feedback on the beta really matters - we use it to understand what changes and improvements to make
• The website you see today will change as we gather more feedback - so the final “completed” version might look very different
• During periods of high usage, it may be a little slower than the rest of the OpenPrescribing platform
• The data available inside OpenPrescribing Hospitals is public data. The primary source containing the pharmacy stock control data is curated by Rx-info and and hosted by the NHS Business Services Authority, published under the Open Government Licence 3.0 . You can read more about the other data sources on our About page

We’ll post more updates here on the Bennett blog as we go along, when new features are available. You can also subscribe to the OpenPrescribing Newsletter if you’d prefer a little more often.