Custom analyses on OpenPrescribing Hospitals

We recently launched the measures feature on OpenPrescribing Hospitals, which shows pre-specified analyses run against the Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD). These measures can help to highlight variation and spot potential improvements in clinical practice, prescribing safety, and cost-effectiveness, but they are not exhaustive. We want to allow users to run their own analysis across products they’re interested in and the organisations they care about, like we do on OpenPrescribing, so we’ve launched a similar feature on OpenPrescribing Hospitals.

See the quantity issued for individual products

The first iteration of the custom analysis feature supports simple analyses of single products in up to 10 NHS trusts. It allows you to see the data, as it is reported in the SCMD. You can access it at hospitals.openprescribing.net/analyse/.

To specify an analysis, use the analysis builder to search for individual products and select NHS trusts that you are interested in. When searching, you will find individual products (Virtual Medicinal Products (VMPs) grouped under their corresponding product group (Virtual Therapeutic Moiety (VTM). For now, only a single product is selectable.

Once you have selected a product, picked at least one NHS trust, and run the analysis, the results section will be populated. The results show:

• A summary of the products included in the analysis.
• A time series chart showing the total quantity issued for the selected products in the selected trusts. If multiple trusts are selected, you can also see a breakdown by trust.
• A summary of the total quantity issued for the selected products across different time periods, including the entire history of the SCMD, the most recent month, the most recent year, and the financial year to date.

Next steps for the analyse feature

This is the first iteration of the custom analysis feature on OpenPrescribing Hospitals. Looking at individual products can surface interesting trends, but the most interesting analyses (such as those in our measures) look at patterns across groups of related products at different geographic levels. Comparing usage across different products is more challenging (read more here) and requires alternative measures of quantity (which we’ll write more about soon).

With this in mind, our next steps with the analyse feature are to:

• Allow analyses across all NHS trusts, with aggregations at ICB, regional and national level.
• Describe alternative measures of quantity and make them available to support custom analyses across multiple products.

We’ll write more about these next steps as we develop and release them. For now, please let us know if you have any feedback or find anything interesting!