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  1. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Biologic Medicines for Severe Asthma

    Victory! We have the hospital medicines data. Now: biologic medicines for severe Asthma

    In July, Ben and Brian wrote a piece in the British Medical Journal arguing that hospital medicines data should be openly shared. Magnificently, the NHS has now made secondary care medicines data (SCMD) available. You can read the full technical specification of the data here but briefly: it is hospital pharmacy stock control data, which is collected and processed by Rx-Info, and is now published on the NHS Business Services Authority website in the NHS dm+d standard we know, love, and have documented well.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    OpenSAFELY Cohort Extractor

    This is the code for the OpenSAFELY cohort extractor tool which supports the authoring of OpenSAFELY-compliant research, by:

    1. Allowing developers to generate random data based on their study expectations. They can then use this as input data when developing analytic models.
    2. Supporting downloading of codelist CSVs from the OpenSAFELY codelists repository, for incorporation into the study definition
    3. Providing tools to understand and visualise the properties of real data, without having direct access to it

    It is also the mechanism by which cohorts are extracted from live database backends within the OpenSAFELY framework.

  5. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    OpenSAFELY Job Runner

    This is the repository for the OpenSAFELY job runner. A job runner is a service that encapsulates: the task of checking out an OpenSAFELY study repo; executing actions defined in its project.yaml configuration file when requested via a jobs queue; and storing its results in a particular locations.

    The documentation is aimed at developers looking for an overview of how the system works. It also has some parts relevant for end users, particularly the project.yaml documentation.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    OpenSAFELY Job Server

    This is the code for the OpenSAFELY job server designed for mediating jobs that can be run in an OpenSAFELY secure environment. The Django app provides a simple REST API which provides a channel for communicating between low-security environments (which can request that jobs be run) and high-security environments (where jobs are run).

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    What is OpenSAFELY?

    What is OpenSAFELY?

    Working on behalf of NHS England we have now built a full, open source, highly secure analytics platform running across the full pseudonymised primary care records of 24 million people, rising soon to 55 million, 95% of the population of England. We have pursued a new model: for privacy, security, low cost, and near-real-time data access, we have built the analytics platform inside the EHR data centre of the major EHR providers, where the data already resides; in addition we have built software that uses tiered increasingly non-disclosive tables to prevent researchers ever needing direct access to the disclosive underlying data to run analyses; code is developed against simulated data using open platforms before moving to the live data environment. Everything has run smoothly. We are fully live inside TPP; we are signed off with full data access and end-stage tech development for the computational platform with EMIS.

  8. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing July Newsletter

    OpenPrescribing and Bennett Institute Papers

    It has been a busy month for paper publication at The Bennett Institute. We have written a brief description of the most recent papers below. Please sharewith colleagues and get in touch if you have any relevant observations! Remember you can read all our academic papers related to OpenPrescribing on our research page.

    Hospital medicines data: We are frequently contacted at OpenPrescribing about when we are going to make a hospital version. Unlike primary care, access to hospital medicines data is restricted. The BMJ have just published our Bennett Institute article about why we think The NHS deserves better use of hospital medicines data.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS Dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d): primary care prescribing of "hospital only" medicines

    Update May 2021 Based on feedback received from users, the NHS dictionary of medicines and devices has decided to cease maintenance of the “hospital only” value at AMP level (it remains at AMPP level). As a result this means that we are no longer able to produce our “Hospital Only measure” and we have retired it.

    Just prior to the COVID-19 emergency we launched a new measure on OpenPrescribing, primary care prescribing of medicines defined by the NHS dictionary of medicines (dm+d) and devices as “hospital only”. In this blog we set out what exactly this means, describe some of our early investigations and interesting (but nerdy) details, and ask for your help in improving and maintaining this dm+d field.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    How I use OpenPrescribing in my practice as a GP

    A guest blog from Dr. Kevin Barrett (Twitter @DrKBarrett).

    Last week the British Journal of General Practice published our paper on unsafe prescribing of methotrexate. As part of the publication Dr. Kevin Barrett talked to BJGP (see video below) about how he used OpenPrescribing to identify potentially unsafe prescribing in his practice and has also written a short blog below.

    When I first started as a GP trainee in 1999 electronic prescribing was a relatively recent innovation. The practice formulary was built by hand, and prescribing analysis only occurred when paper Prescribing Analysis and CosT (PACT) reports were sent to the practice. These evolved into ePACT reports, but these still required time to decipher. With the advent of Primary Care Trust (PCT) and then Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) employed pharmacists who had the time to analyse the data and present practice- and prescriber-level data to us at a range of meetings we became used to comparing our prescribing data to our peers. Electronic prescribing aids are a useful measure to help guide our prescribing and keep us up to date with the ever-changing local and national recommendations.

  11. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing June Newsletter

    Methotrexate Prescribing Safety — New paper in BJGP

    This week the British Journal of General Practice published our latest paper on unsafe prescribing of methotrexate. We found that the prevalence of unsafe methotrexate prescribing (10mg tablets) has reduced but remains common, with substantial variation between practices and CCGs. In the paper we also discuss recommendations for better strategies around implementation.

    Anyone can view the live data on unsafe methotrexate prescribing at openprescribing.net/measure/methotrexate, to support audit and review in your local organisation. Read the paper here and you can watch Dr. Kevin Barret (twitter @drkbarret) describe here how his practice used OpenPrescribing to identify a breach of their practice policy on methotreaxte prescribing and fix it!

  12. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Your Organisation's OpenPrescribing Custom Email Alerts

    At OpenPrescribing we know that clinicians can be overwhelmed with guidance and data about many different aspects of care. We therefore have developed an innovative email alert service for every single practice, primary care network and clinical commissioning group in England that delivers bespoke custom emails to your inbox about your own organisations prescribing.

    To sign up to your organisation’s alerts all you need to do is:

    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 see an example of an OpenPrescribing practice email alert here and you can read more about the methods in our paper.

  13. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter May 2020

    OpenSAFELY.org

    OpenSAFELY is a new secure analytics platform for electronic health records in the NHS, created to deliver urgent results during the global COVID-19 emergency. OpenSAFELY is a collaboration between the Bennett Institute, the EHR group at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and TPP who produce SystmOne. OpenSAFELY is now successfully delivering analyses across more than 24 million patients’ full pseudonymised primary care NHS records. The first analysis from OpenSAFELY is Factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients with more answers to important questions expected shortly.

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    Impact of COVID-19 on prescribing in English general practice: March 2020

    OpenPrescribing.net has been updated this week with the latest release of prescribing data covering March 2020. In-depth analysis will be needed over the coming months, but this release gives us the first glimpse into the impact that COVID-19 has had on prescribing. At the Bennett Institute we have been quite busy with the new secure analytics platform OpenSAFELY but the following blog is a rapid analysis of the March prescribing data which others may find helpful to focus their own investigations. As always, all our analytical code is openly available on our GitHub for inspection and reuse by anyone.

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    COVID-19 TrialsTracker

    This repository contains the data cleaning notebook, all necessary datasets, and the code for running the COVID-19 TrialsTracker website at covid19.trialstracker.net. Docker files are included to ensure a consistent environment for reproducibility.

  16. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    What are the most commonly prescribed medicines? Top 10 prescribed medicines in NHS England primary care for 2019

    The following is a rapid analysis of the “top 10” medicines in NHS England primary care in 2019. We prepared this analysis for a user who wanted to use the list in a teaching session with students to prepare them for the medicines they will most commonly see in general practice. We are sure others will find it useful — please get in touch and tell us how you use it via Twitter or feedback@openprescribing.net. As always our analysis with complete analytical code is openly available on our GitHub page. You can also investigate the prescribing of any medicines you like using our tools like our Analyse page, chemical trends and our brand new browser for the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices. Read on below where we describe the “top 10” medicines and class of medicines, in terms of volume and cost.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Changes to NHS medicines data: a rapid analysis from the Bennett Institute

    At the Bennett Institute we like to work in the open and share our insights for the whole community, so we can fix a problem for us, then share the solution, and help fix it for everyone. We think this is efficient for us and the whole system. In this blog our magnificent coder Peter Inglesby sets out some analysis he has done of changes to the NHS prescribing data we use. It took us a few hours to investigate these problems for our own purposes, then document our findings and solutions internally; it took an extra 20 minutes to share in this blog post and now we give it to you so you don’t have to replicate our effort and can maybe find some insights we have missed!