Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

18 Jan 2019

Ghost Branded Generics: A new dashboard on OpenPrescribing

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.

20 Dec 2018

Ghost branded generics: Why does the cost of generic atorvastatin vary?

This a very nerdy story about a problem that costs the NHS £11.6m a year. It shows how one small design choice in the software GPs use can have huge ramifications for how we prescribe, and a huge cost impact on the NHS. More than that, it shows how problems like these can only be spotted, and addressed, by mixed teams like ours — doctors, pharmacists, researchers and software engineers — pooling our different skills to build tools and papers.

19 Dec 2018

Dispensing data shows huge variation in Out of Pocket Expenses

Each year, we estimate there are up to £5m of Out of Pocket Expenses (OOPE) expenses charged to the NHS, added by dispensing contractors to their invoices. Could some of these expenses be reduced? In 2014/15 NHS Islington CCG wrote to dispensing contractors highlighting such expenses, and from this single intervention achieved a 50% reduction; spread across the country this could amount to a saving of £2.5m. We’ve done some initial investigations, but don’t have resources to follow up in detail.

18 Dec 2018

2018 Round-Up

In our third full year of existence we produced even more exciting outputs and continued to grow. We welcomed Lydia Berry, back from maternity leave; Dave Evans, Consultant Programmer, who joined the OpenPrescribing technical team; and Brian MacKenna, an Honorary Research Fellow Pharmacist and member of the NHS England Medicines and Diagnostics Policy Unit. We also welcomed Darren Smyth, a UK and European Patent Attorney - our work so far includes our pregabalin papers (here and here), and he has also contributed to our EUCTR work.

12 Dec 2018

New Lawsuit Against US Government Cites FDAAA Tracker

Earlier this week, the Media, Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School filed a lawsuit against the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH, and the FDA over their interpretation and implementation of trial reporting provisions in the FDA Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA 2007). The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Charles Seife, a journalist and NYU professor, and Dr. Peter Lurie, President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

10 Dec 2018

OpenPrescribing December 2018 Newsletter

New “do not prescribe” measures on OpenPrescribing.net At OpenPrescribing we pride ourselves on developing our tools in response to the needs of our users. Last week NHS England announced a new “Do Not Prescribe” list for consultation. Within an hour we made graphs showing every GP practice’s prescribing of these items. You can drill down to CCG level, and then practice level. We hope that this data will be useful for clinicians and CCG pharmacists to identify where there is most room for improvement, or change.

2 Dec 2018

Price Concessions Calculator — A New Feature on OpenPrescribing

This week we launched a new feature on OpenPrescribing, an NHS Price Concession calculator. We show the cost impact of price concessions for the whole of England here and the calculator appears on every single practice and CCG dashboard so you can work out the impact locally. What are price concessions and what are the broader issues? Price concessions are a short term agreement by the NHS to pay more than the already agreed price for a generic medicine because pharmacists are unable to obtain the generic at its usual price.

30 Nov 2018

New measures for latest "Do Not Prescribe" list under consultation

Earlier this week NHS England announced a new “Do Not Prescribe” list for consultation. Within an hour we made graphs showing every GP practice’s prescribing of these items. You can drill down to CCG level, and then practice level. We hope that this data will be useful for clinicians and CCG pharmacists to identify where there is most room for improvement, or change. Or, to drive discussion about agreement on the guidance.

27 Nov 2018

Limitations of NHS England prescribing data

The data that drives OpenPrescribing is described briefly in our FAQ. It is supplied by NHSBSA and NHS Digital, and a few other sources. Over the years we have come to understand the limitations of this data. We’re sharing them here, so researchers can take them into account when carrying out analyses. When using Practice Level Prescribing Data, bear in mind: The data relates to primary care prescribing only. Secondary care prescribing is not included.

5 Nov 2018

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.

29 Oct 2018

Phenytoin Supply Disruption Alert

Drug supply issues are an interesting use-case for OpenPrescribing. Here we will talk about a recent example. What is the problem? Last week the Department of Health and Social Care issued a “Supply Disruption Alert” for Epanutin (phenytoin) 30mg/5ml oral suspension: Pfizer, the manufacturer, will be out of stock of this product from the week commencing 29th October (today) until early December 2018. This means people currently taking Epanutin (phenytoin) 30mg/5ml oral suspension may need to be prescribed a different product.

23 Oct 2018

All England Dashboard - A New Feature on OpenPrescribing.net

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).

25 Sep 2018

IQWiG Response to the EU TrialsTracker

The EU TrialsTracker, which provides the results reporting status of every trial on the EU Clinical Trials Registry, launched last week alongside a paper in the BMJ. We already shared some of the media coverage from the launch of the tracker and comments from Norman Lamb MP, Chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and Fergus Sweeney, Head of Inspections, Human Medicines Pharmacovigilance and Committees at EMA.

19 Sep 2018

The EU TrialsTracker is Live!

Earlier this year we launched our FDAAA TrialsTracker, providing a live look at whether individual sponsors and trialists are meeting their responsibility to report the results of clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov. Now we have launched the EU TrialsTracker. This new tracker shows the results status for every trial on the EU Clinical Trials Registry (EUCTR). We are launching the tracker alongside a paper in the BMJ providing a detailed overview of our methods, an analysis of the factors associated with non-reporting and a discussion of the data issues that make assessing compliance difficult on EUCTR.

19 Sep 2018

TrialsTracker Project Wins Cochrane-REWARD Prize for Reducing Research Waste

Our FDAAA TrialsTracker has been updating each working day since February showing which trials on ClinicalTrials.gov have reported, in compliance with the FDA Amendments Act of 2007. Our newly launched EU TrialsTracker and paper in the BMJ show exactly which trials on the EUCTR have reported according to EU guidelines. This week we’re delighted to tell you that our TrialsTracker work has been awarded a Cochrane-REWARD Prize for Reducing Research Waste.

18 Sep 2018

EUCTR Trials Tracker

This repository contains all the data extraction and front-end code for EU Trials Tracker.

13 Sep 2018

Nearly half of the EU's clinical trial results go unreported

This article in Quartz, by Jane C Hu, reports on our BMJ paper assessing compliance with requirement to report results on the EU Clinical Trials Register and the associated EU TrialsTracker.

12 Sep 2018

Could North Cumbria save money on haemorrhoid cream?

Last week, a pharmacist from NHS North Cumbria CCG got our attention by mentioning OpenPrescribing on Twitter. He had just received a letter about a product for treating haemorrhoids called Uniroid. It’s a 50/50 mixture of Cinchocaine and Hydrocortisone, and is also available as Proctosedyl (made by Sanofi), and as a generic (i.e. unbranded) product. The maker of Uniroid wants North Cumbria to start prescribing Uniroid-branded products, on the grounds it will save the CCG about £11,000 per year.