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  1. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter: October 2018

    The launch of the All England dashboard, support for responding to phenytoin supply disruption, and tools for antimicrobial stewardship.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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).

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • Research Integrity

    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.

    Today we wanted to share a statement, released on Friday, from the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) in Germany. For those that are not familiar, IQWiG is the German institute responsible for assessing the quality and efficiency of medical interventions, similar to the role NICE plays in the UK. We were pleased to see a government institute calling explicitly for better results reporting from publicly-funded institutions. IQWiG offers frank experiences from their own work in which withheld data compromised their ability to properly assess the evidence for treatments under review. The director of IQWiG, Jürgen Windeler, specifically calls for a system that checks “whether an applicant has completely reported its previously funded project in the EU Register and, if applicable, refuse further funding.”

  5. Posted
    Categories
    • Research Integrity

    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.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • TrialsTracker

    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. We’re honored to share the 2nd prize with the wonderful James Lind Alliance; and further humbled to finish behind the mighty EQUATOR Network, who took a well-deserved 1st prize for their continued work on improving the quality of trial reporting.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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.

  11. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter: July 2018

    How OpenPrescribing’s alerts detect changes before practices become extreme outliers, plus new category filters for prescribing measures.

  12. Posted
    Categories
    • TrialsTracker

    FDAAA TrialsTracker Milestones: 6 Months, >1200 trials, $500 Million in Fines

    On February 19, 2018 we launched the FDAAA TrialsTracker, a tool that automatically monitors whether clinical trials are reporting their results to ClinicalTrials.gov in accordance with US law. We bring public accountability by ranking sponsors, and help researchers to comply with the law by showing them which of their trials are overdue. We also calculate the total fines the FDA could have imposed to date on non-compliers.

    This week marks two important milestones for the FDAAA TrialsTracker. Firstly, it’s six months since we first launched (and 6 months since the first trials came due under the “Final Rule” of the FDA Amendments Act). Secondly - coincidentally - we’ve just hit the $500,000,000 mark in unclaimed fines for the FDA.

  13. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    New on OpenPrescribing — our measures now have categories!

    Update: You can view a short Youtube video demonstrating this feature here.

    On our OpenPrescribing CCG and practice dashboards you can now filter measures by category to view a small group of related measures together.

    You can select a category using the new dropdown menu above the measures…

    …Or by clicking on a category listed at the bottom of the description of a measure.

    Upon selecting a category you’ll see its description / rationale above the measures:

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter: June 2018

    New research examines pregabalin patent litigation and Lyrica prescribing, alongside site improvements that flag closed or dormant practices.

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter: May 2018

    Research on low-priority prescribing, 2017 data in the Long Term Trends tool, and a call for measures highlighting easy prescribing improvements.

  16. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    "PPPI": why academics should engage Patients, the Public *and* Professionals

    This is a brief blog about something small and trivial, but also big and important.

    Recently on the staircase my friend Carl Heneghan came out with a good line about “Patient and Public Involvement”, or “PPI” as it is known in the trade. “People talk about PPI,” he said: “but we need PPPI… patients, the public, and professionals.”

    I think this is absolutely correct. In academia, we often fail to focus on what happens at the coalface. In the Bennett Institute we’ve worked hard to change that. We take conventional academic funder money, and health data, and we produce conventional academic papers (by the shovel-load). But we also turn that data and person-time into live, interactive, data-driven tools like OpenPrescribing.net which people can hold in their hands, and use at the coalface to improve patient care.

  17. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter: April 2018

    New research on homeopathy and gluten-free prescribing, plus tips for using the Analyse page to investigate prescribing variation and trends.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • TrialsTracker

    Unreported Clinical Trial of the Week Round-Up

    In February, we posted our first Unreported Trial of the Week here in the Bennett Institute blog highlighting a trial from Columbia University. Since then, that trial has submitted results to ClinicalTrials.gov and Unreported Trial of the Week has moved to the BMJ!

    Each week we profile a new unreported clinical trial that has not reported results in accordance with their legal requirements. You can see all four trials we have profiled thus far as well as the introductory post at the BMJ. A short summary and a link to each of the first four trials is provided below.