OpenPrescribing Hospitals: analysing medicines usage at different organisational levels
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This article is part of a series: OpenPrescribing Hospitals: Analyse
- Custom analyses on OpenPrescribing Hospitals
- OpenPrescribing Hospitals: analysing medicines usage at different organisational levels
A few months ago, we launched the custom analysis feature on OpenPrescribing Hospitals. At the Bennett Institute we pride ourselves on developing our tools swiftly and iterating them, in public, based on the needs of our users. Our first iteration supported simple analyses of the quantity of individual products issued in selected NHS trusts. Since launch, we’ve had lots of great feedback on this feature, based on which we’ve made some updates.
What did you ask for?
Following the initial release of the Analyse feature, the three most common requests we’ve received are:
- Can we see integrated care board (ICB), region, and national grouping?
- How do we see which trusts use the most of a product?
- Can we analyse more than one product at a time?
The good news is, these are now possible using the updated version of the Analyse feature! We’ll be showing how in a series of blog posts.
Run analysis across all NHS trusts in England
As well as supporting analyses across individual NHS trusts, you can now run custom analyses grouped by ICB, NHS region or nationally.
The examples below show the various results reported for a custom analysis of apixaban 5mg tablets, which can be selected by changing the View Mode within the results section.
NHS trust mode
In NHS trust mode, variation in issuing of the selected products across NHS trusts is shown in the form of a percentiles chart (as we do in Measures, which you can read more about in our blog post, Highlighting variation in hospitals medicines usage).
The red line shows the trust-level median for the quantity of the selected products issued over time, with the percentile bands showing the extent of variation. If trusts are selected in the analysis, their data is overlaid on this percentiles chart, to allow comparison with other NHS trusts. In the chart below, data for King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is overlaid on this percentile chart to allow comparison.
ICB and region mode
In ICB and region mode, the quantities issued by individual trusts are grouped by the ICB or NHS region to which they belong (you can see a list of NHS regions, the ICBs within them and the NHS Trusts within each ICB using the Submission History).
National mode
National mode shows the total quantity of the selected products issued across all NHS trusts nationally.
The above examples highlight the richer analyses at different organisational levels that are now possible with the OpenPrescribing Hospitals Analyse feature.
In the next post, we’ll show our new summary tables. Here you can see exactly who has been using lots of a product or equally none whatsoever! If you have any feedback on the updates or would like to share the results of an interesting analysis, please let us know!