Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

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.

12 Sep 2018

Smoothing seasonality - your feedback needed

Recently we created antimicrobial stewardship dashboards for every Clinical Commissioning Group and General Practice in England by grouping our measures (see our blog post here). We received feedback from users that some of our measures are difficult to understand, because they exhibit a high level of seasonal variation. Antibiotics show the most seasonality amongst our measures (e.g. openprescribing.net/measure/ktt9_antibiotics). As you can see below, it takes a lot of staring at this graph to work out whether the deciles (blue lines) are going up or down overall, and whether the red line (the data from a single CCG) is changing in relation to them.

30 Aug 2018

OpenPrescribing July 2018 newsletter

This newsletter was sent out on Thurs, Jul 26; sign up to receive the next one at www.openprescribing.net We do the stats to make your life easy… At OpenPrescribing we hide complicated data science “under the bonnet”: we want data to be easy, to come alive and tap you on the shoulder when there’s a problem. As you know we have an “alerts” service, open and free to anyone, that emails you if there’s a new issue with the prescribing at any practice.