OpenPathology aims to make an innovative new tool showing comparative data on pathology test requests made by GPs.
It aims to:
This project set out to standardise the blood tests used for monitoring of chronic conditions in primary care across North Devon, and to measure and reduce the harms of unwarranted testing.
Status: Published
A retrospective analysis of 16 million tests performed over 3.3 million patient years in 2015/16. We set out to identify tests ordered from UK primary care that are subject to the greatest between-practice variation in their use.
Status: Published
Assessing the temporal change in test use in UK primary care and to identify tests with the greatest increase in use.
Status: Published
We explored C-reactive Protein (CRP) and Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR) tests ordered across Oxfordshire NHS General Practices, and the proportion of tests that yielded an abnormal result, and identified practices that had a proportion of abnormal CRP and ESR results 3 standard deviations below the mean.
Status: Published
This is the code related to our OpenPathology project. Specifically this repo stores ad-hoc analyses, papers, and related research.
The code for the website (and online tool, when developed) are in their own repository.
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.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.
This is the third instalment in our series of commentaries on using reference ranges to interpret pathology test results.
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).
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.
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.
