OpenPrescribing October 2018 Newsletter

All England Dashboard - A New Feature on OpenPrescribing.net

At OpenPrescribing we pride ourselves on developing our tools in response to the needs of our users. OpenPrescribing is being increasingly used at national organisations and we have had many requests for an All England dashboard. This month we launched the first version of the All England dashboard and blogged about it here.

Phenytoin Supply Disruption Alert

At the Bennett Institute we get many emails about how people are using OpenPrescribing and this month we blogged about how OpenPrescribing can be helpful when medicines are in short supply. Epanutin (phenytoin) 30mg/5ml oral suspension is currently subject to a Supply Disruption Alert and it is very important that patients are identified promptly and their prescriptions are modified if appropriate. To read more about the alert and how OpenPrescribing can be helpful please see the blog here. If you have any other interesting usecases please get in touch at feedback@openprescribing.net

Health Select Committee release report on Antimicrobial Resistance

The Health Select Committee has released their report on Antimicrobial Resistance and make a series of recommendations that the government and national NHS organisations should implement, to reduce the threat that Antimicrobial Resistance poses to people’s health.

The Bennett Institute submitted evidence to the committee about the work we have done and the variation in antimicrobial prescribing we have identified using OpenPrescribing. We were delighted that the committee found our evidence useful and made recommendations based on it (they also included lots of lovely OpenPrescribing graphs!). We continue to provide data analysis to support Antimicrobial Stewardship on OpenPrescribing and have recently launched our All England Antimicrobial Stewardship dashboard here. To view the Antimicrobial Stewardship dashboard for your practice or CCG please see our blog post here.

RCGP Conference in Glasgow — OpenPrescribing, and how to make research more useful!

At the RCGP annual conference in Glasgow the Bennett Institute team led a workshop demonstrating OpenPrescribing.net to a room packed full with hundreds of eager GPs and other staff. Helen and Georgia showed how we build our tools, sped through some of our recent research, and most importantly: gave rapid tutorials showing how anyone can come to OpenPrescribing and view prescribing data for themselves, to improve quality, safety, and cost effectiveness. We are passionate about data being in the hands of the many, so it was great to see so many GPs with their eyes open wide to accessing this data for themselves. We also picked up lots of great feature requests, and new collaborators: as always, get in touch if you have ideas you’d like us to work on!

Also at the RCGP annual conference, our curly-haired dictator Ben Goldacre gave a rapid-fire plenary lecture arguing that researchers need to step outside of their comfort zone to make data relevant to clinicians and patients. In particular, he argued that conventional academic papers are not the answer to improving patient care: we need to make it easier for clinicians to put evidence into practice, and sweep aside the regulatory barriers to cheaper better evidence by collaborating with software engineers, lawyers, lobbyists, patients, funders, and more. You can watch the video here and see his slides here.

OpenPathology first steps

We had a very successful first technical meeting for our new service, OpenPathology.net, modelled on our work with prescribing data. We think that good quality data tools are vitally important for better clinical care, combining cutting edge data science under the bonnet with user-friendly service. There are more details on the OpenPathology.net website if you are interested, and as ever, get in touch if you’re interested to collaborate or have specific user-needs that you would like addressed.

Health Tech Advisory Board appointment

We produce digital health tools, but we’re also interested in the techniques, context, and policy issues around digital health. So it’s great to be able to share that our Director Ben Goldacre has been announced as the the Chair of the HealthTech Advisory Board reporting to Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health. We’re also about to deliver a series of policy outputs on better use of data in healthcare. If you have thoughts to share — successes, barriers — do get in touch. And of course, as always, if there are specific new data tools or bits of research that you’d like to see from our team, as ever, we are here to serve: bennett@phc.ox.ac.uk

OpenPrescribing comes to you

If you are running an event for doctors, pharmacists, nurses or anyone interested in using data to improve care, please contact feedback@openprescribing.net. Brian, one of our pharmacists, will try to get your event over the coming months.

Prescribing data update!

We’ve updated OpenPrescribing with August’s data. Head over to <www.openprescribing.net> to see more.

We now include data of the new merged CCGs — we’ve put a lot of work into making these CCGs appear consistently over the 5 years of data we show, but please let us know if you spot anything that doesn’t look right

In other news…

House of Commons Select Committee Releases Report on Trials Transparency

Yesterday, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee released their “Research integrity: clinical trials transparency” report detailing the state of selective publication of clinical trial data in the UK. Our work and evidence provided to the committee by the Bennett Institute Director Ben Goldacre and the AllTrials campaign are cited throughout the report to describe the extent of non-reporting in the UK and offer potential solutions moving forward. The report demands action from various government and academic stakeholders to better address this issue. You can read the full report here and the related press release here. Our recent BMJ article on reporting results to the EU registry is available here.