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  1. 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!

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS England Investment and Impact Fund — A new dashboard on OpenPrescribing

    Update September 2020: NHS England have announced a reduction in the number of planned measures including the majority of the measures on OpenPrescribing. We will remove the IIF dashboard in a future update.

    Update: Due to COVID19 response NHS England has announced that the IIF will be postponed. We will continue to make this dashboard available as NHS England also states that they will continue to monitor the data to understand any impact.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing.yourcountry

    At the Bennett Institute we get many people contacting us every month asking us when OpenPrescribing will be available in their country. In this blog we are outlining OpenPrescribing.yourcountry where we give you the information that you can use locally to build a case for OpenPrescribing in your country and obtain funding to support development. We aren’t quite ready to build OpenPrescribing.yourcountry yet, but we will be soon and we wanted to share our plans so you can be ready when we are.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    Bennett Institute – What We Did Last Year!

    Most people share their end of year roundup during late December when everyone is too full of cake to read. Now you’re back in the saddle, here’s our roundup of everything the Bennett Institute threw out into the world over the previous 12 months!

    OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing.net went from strength to strength, with over 135,000 unique users last year. We now have over 80 measures of prescribing safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness and have been working on new types of measures and alerts to identify “outlier” prescribing, such as with zuclopenthixol. In 2019 we also: launched new dashboards and bespoke alerts for every single primary care network (PCN), sustainability and transformation partnership (STP), and NHS region; upgraded the Analyse page to support more organisations with bespoke medicines queries; and developed tools to help solve the problem of Ghost Branded Generics which cost the NHS an extra £11.6million per annum but has massively reduced during 2019.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Greener NHS Prescribing Dashboards

    Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our Greener NHS prescribing dashboards. Over recent months there has been increasing attention on the environment and the effects society is having on climate change. The NHS announced specific targets as part of its long term plan to become more sustainable, reduce waste and shift to lower carbon inhalers. At OpenPrescribing we have already launched our first prescribing measure related to the environment and this week we are launching our Greener NHS prescribing dashboard for every single general practice, primary care network (PCN), clinical commissioning group (CCG), sustainability and transformation partnership (STP), NHS region and for the whole of England.To access your Greener NHS prescribing dashboard, simply go to your organisation’s measures page and select “Greener NHS” from the drop-down. You can read more about our categories on our blog or watch our short Youtube video.

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — NICE Prescribing Dashboards

    Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — NICE Prescribing Dashboard. We have a NICE prescribing dashboard for every single general practice, primary care network (PCN), clinical commissioning group (CCG), sustainability and transformation partnership (STP), NHS region and for the whole of England. This allows anyone to explore how NICE guidance has been implemented in their organisation, supporting effective, safer and more efficient prescribing. To access yours, simply go to your organisation’s measures page and select “NICE” from the drop-down. You can read more about our categories here or watch our short Youtube video:

  8. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter November 2019

    PCN Dashboards Now Live!

    We have now launched our long-awaited Primary Care Networks (PCNs) dashboard, made possible thanks to the the membership list being published by NHS England last week.

    We have PCN prescribing dashboards for every single NHS PCN and their member general practices. (Don’t know your PCN’s name? You can find it on your practice dashboard). This allows anyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in their PCN and how this compares to others across England — supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • Policy Insights

    Reporting Withdrawn Trials on the EUCTR

    Our EU TrialsTracker has been assessing compliance with EU trial reporting guidelines for over a year now. Our data has been used by Parliamentary Committees and trial sponsors to improve the reporting of clinical trials registered on the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR).

    We previously shared some of the data issues that make complete assessments of trials on the EUCTR difficult. One particularly troubling issue is dealing with trials that never began. Sometimes trials get all the necessary approvals to begin, and therefore are automatically registered on the EUCTR. In rare instances, and for any number of reasons, they then simply never begin; they are cancelled before they enroll a single participant or collect any data. Obviously, these trials have no results to report.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    High Dose Dexamethasone

    A guest blog from Calum Polwart (Twitter @ShinyBlackShoe)

    At the Bennett Institute we value openness and transparency as we believe open discussion of ideas and methods are the key ingredients for high quality data analysis. We think it is unhelpful that so much NHS data analysis is outsourced, or done behind closed doors, as this prevents coalface clinicians from engaging with data and sharing their expertise and insights. We build OpenPrescribing.net, not just for ourselves, but for anyone to explore NHS prescribing data. This democratisation of prescribing data removes gatekeepers and barriers to accessing the data, allows anyone to scrutinise prescribing and produces new insights.

  11. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Primary Care Networks (PCN) Dashboards — A new prescribing dashboard on OpenPrescribing

    Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our Primary Care Networks (PCNs) dashboard. We have PCN prescribing dashboards available for every single NHS PCN and their member general practices. This allows anyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in their PCN and see how this compares to other PCNs across England — supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.

    Figure 1: South Islington PCN OpenPrescribing Dashboard

    Figure 1: South Islington PCN OpenPrescribing Dashboard

    What are NHS PCNs?

    PCNs are groups of practices, which together serve communities of around 30,000-50,000 people, with the aim of improving care for patients. PCNs were announced as part of the NHS long term plan and many PCNs have formed already and started to recruit staff such as clinical directors and clinical pharmacists to improve and optimise the use of medicines. We hope our PCN prescribing dashboards will assist everyone across the country to identify and prioritise areas where prescribing can be improved.

  12. Posted
    Categories
    • Policy Insights

    Science and Technology Select Committee Follows-Up on Trials Transparency

    Last week, the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee convened an inquiry following-up their previous clinical trials transparency efforts. The Select Committee has been very active in the trials transparency space over the past two years. Earlier this year they sent letters to every public university and NHS trust in the UK that sponsors clinical trials on the EU register. These letters reminded sponsors of their trial reporting responsibilities and provided them with reporting performance figures based on data from our EU TrialsTracker.

  13. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter October 2019

    New Paper in BMJ

    Our newest paper is now out in the BMJ! Here we show huge variation in adoption of warranted changes in prescribing behaviour, using some exciting new openly available change detection methods.

    New measures

    We now have over 80 measures!

    This month we have launched a range of new measures. As always, measures are prioritised on your dashboard by potential for improvement so you can quickly and easily spot where your organisation is an outlier. You can also sort by potential savings or group measures by clinical condition.

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 3

    This is the third instalment in our series of commentaries on using reference ranges to interpret pathology test results.

    Reference ranges vary between labs

    Classically, the reference range is defined statistically: it is the interval within which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. Therefore 2.5% of the time, healthy people will have (for example) haemoglobin concentrations less than the lower limit, and 2.5% of the time it will be over the upper limit. (Read more in our previous blog).

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 2

    This is the second installment in our series of commentaries on reference ranges used to interpret pathology test results. Here we describe two issues relating to how meaningful reference ranges are.

    Reference ranges are usually indicators of statistical outliers in a healthy reference population

    The most common type of reference range is defined as the interval between which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. In other words, 2.5% of the time, healthy people will have haemoglobin concentrations less than the lower limit.

  16. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 1

    As the OpenPathology project has progressed, we have started to build measures to describe variation between practices, and groups of practices.

    While comparing rates of requests per head of population can be used as a simple measure of possible over- or under-use of tests compared to other practices, it doesn’t take into account the general health needs of the population, so it can be difficult to rule out warranted variation. Therefore, comparing variation in rates of abnormal results is another useful measure to consider.

  17. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: fake seasonality in potassium results — dangerous and avoidable

    In our initial analyses of pathology data from the South West for our OpenPathology.net project, there is a pronounced (sometimes extreme) increase in high potassium results during the winter months, and a corresponding increase in low-potassium results in summer:

    What’s causing it?

    The level of potassium in plasma within a blood sample is affected by temperature. Potassium can move into and out of blood cells during storage: in cooler temperatures, potassium diffuses out of cells into plasma, leading to the reading being artefactually higher, while in higher temperatures an enzyme works to pump potassium into the cells.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPathology

    OpenPathology: Seasonality in Haemoglobin test results

    In our initial analyses of pathology data from the South West for our OpenPathology.net project, we have noticed subtle but consistent variation in haemoglobin test results throughout the year. Haemoglobin (Hb) levels falling below certain threshold values typically give a diagnosis of anaemia.

    In the following regional sample we see that the mean Hb concentration across both males and females differs by 2-3 g/l between the summer low and the winter peak: