This week we have launched a new page on OpenPrescribing.net, the All England dashboard, that allows anyone to see the quality of prescribing at a national level. For the first time we have aggregated all the savings from all our measures in one place. For the month of August these numbers are quite staggering:

  • £13,190,000 - could potentially have been saved if CCGs used our innovative price-per-unit tool (you can read our methods paper here).

  • £2,936,000 - could have been saved if CCGs reduced their prescribing on things NHS England say should no longer be routinely prescribed in primary care, in line with the lowest prescribing decile of CCGs.

  • £1,525,000 - could have been saved if CCGs prescribed in line with the best decile in all our other measures which we have identified as cost-saving.

These figures don’t even take into account the potential for improvement on any of our measures which could reduce the threat of harm to patients by being safer or more effective.

There are some even more staggering figures behind the All England page:

  • 600 million rows
  • 120 gigabytes of data

These figures are processed swiftly and efficiently behind the scenes so you can see all the prescribing across England at the click of a button.

We build useful tools like this for our users by all pooling knowledge and skills. We are a small mixed team of clinicians, academics, and software engineers and we pride ourselves on developing our tools in response to the needs of our users. If you have any suggestions for the All England page please get in touch at feedback@openprescribing.net