Before Christmas we wrote a nerdy story about Ghost Branded Generics, a problem that costs the NHS £11.6m a year due to prescribers selecting specific manufacturer’s products rather than true generics. This is largely avoidable. Today we launch our Ghost Branded Generics dashboard for every practice and CCG in the country. This can be accessed through every dashboard page (example below) and we think it will be useful to help people change prescriptions from Ghost Branded Generics to true generic prescriptions.

The NHS Business Services Authority does not release the detailed data we need to comprehensively identify every Ghost Branded Generic but our dashboard will identify the majority of prescription items for people in local CCGs and practices to review.

At the Bennett Institute we build useful tools like this for our users by pooling all our 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. Our code is open source and you can explore it here. If you have any suggestions for the Ghost Branded Generics dashboard or spot something interesting in your local data please get in touch at feedback@openprescribing.net