Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

6 Feb 2020

OpenPrescribing.yourcountry

At the Bennett Institute we get many people contacting us every month asking us when OpenPrescribing will be available in their country. In this blog we are outlining OpenPrescribing.yourcountry where we give you the information that you can use locally to build a case for OpenPrescribing in your country and obtain funding to support development. We aren’t quite ready to build OpenPrescribing.yourcountry yet, but we will be soon and we wanted to share our plans so you can be ready when we are.

5 Feb 2020

Bennett Institute – What We Did Last Year!

Most people share their end of year roundup during late December when everyone is too full of cake to read. Now you’re back in the saddle, here’s our roundup of everything the Bennett Institute threw out into the world over the previous 12 months! OpenPrescribing OpenPrescribing.net went from strength to strength, with over 135,000 unique users last year. We now have over 80 measures of prescribing safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness and have been working on new types of measures and alerts to identify “outlier” prescribing, such as with zuclopenthixol.

17 Jan 2020

Data Processing and Analysis Code for Results Reporting Trends on ClinicalTrials.gov under FDAAA 2007

This is the repository containing everything you need to recreate our analysis published in The Lancet assessing compliance with the Final Rule of The Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA) (2007). The code can also be easily adapted for future analyses of interest using ClinicalTrials.gov data.

19 Dec 2019

Greener NHS Prescribing Dashboards

Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our Greener NHS prescribing dashboards. Over recent months there has been increasing attention on the environment and the effects society is having on climate change. The NHS announced specific targets as part of its long term plan to become more sustainable, reduce waste and shift to lower carbon inhalers. At OpenPrescribing we have already launched our first prescribing measure related to the environment and this week we are launching our Greener NHS prescribing dashboard for every single general practice, primary care network (PCN), clinical commissioning group (CCG), sustainability and transformation partnership (STP), NHS region and for the whole of England.

19 Dec 2019

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — NICE Prescribing Dashboards

Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our National Institute for Health and Care Excellence — NICE Prescribing Dashboard. We have a NICE prescribing dashboard for every single general practice, primary care network (PCN), clinical commissioning group (CCG), sustainability and transformation partnership (STP), NHS region and for the whole of England. This allows anyone to explore how NICE guidance has been implemented in their organisation, supporting effective, safer and more efficient prescribing.

2 Dec 2019

OpenPrescribing Newsletter November 2019

PCN Dashboards Now Live! We have now launched our long-awaited Primary Care Networks (PCNs) dashboard, made possible thanks to the the membership list being published by NHS England last week. We have PCN prescribing dashboards for every single NHS PCN and their member general practices. (Don’t know your PCN’s name? You can find it on your practice dashboard). This allows anyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in their PCN and how this compares to others across England — supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.

2 Dec 2019

Reporting Withdrawn Trials on the EUCTR

Our EU TrialsTracker has been assessing compliance with EU trial reporting guidelines for over a year now. Our data has been used by Parliamentary Committees and trial sponsors to improve the reporting of clinical trials registered on the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR). We previously shared some of the data issues that make complete assessments of trials on the EUCTR difficult. One particularly troubling issue is dealing with trials that never began.

28 Nov 2019

High Dose Dexamethasone

A guest blog from Calum Polwart (Twitter @ShinyBlackShoe) At the Bennett Institute we value openness and transparency as we believe open discussion of ideas and methods are the key ingredients for high quality data analysis. We think it is unhelpful that so much NHS data analysis is outsourced, or done behind closed doors, as this prevents coalface clinicians from engaging with data and sharing their expertise and insights. We build OpenPrescribing.

27 Nov 2019

Primary Care Networks (PCN) Dashboards — A new prescribing dashboard on OpenPrescribing

Today on OpenPrescribing.net we have launched our Primary Care Networks (PCNs) dashboard. We have PCN prescribing dashboards available for every single NHS PCN and their member general practices. This allows anyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in their PCN and see how this compares to other PCNs across England — supporting safer, more efficient prescribing. Figure 1: South Islington PCN OpenPrescribing Dashboard What are NHS PCNs? PCNs are groups of practices, which together serve communities of around 30,000-50,000 people, with the aim of improving care for patients.

10 Nov 2019

Science and Technology Select Committee Follows-Up on Trials Transparency

Last week, the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee convened an inquiry following-up their previous clinical trials transparency efforts. The Select Committee has been very active in the trials transparency space over the past two years. Earlier this year they sent letters to every public university and NHS trust in the UK that sponsors clinical trials on the EU register. These letters reminded sponsors of their trial reporting responsibilities and provided them with reporting performance figures based on data from our EU TrialsTracker.

29 Oct 2019

OpenPrescribing Newsletter October 2019

New Paper in BMJ Our newest paper is now out in the BMJ! Here we show huge variation in adoption of warranted changes in prescribing behaviour, using some exciting new openly available change detection methods. New measures We now have over 80 measures! This month we have launched a range of new measures. As always, measures are prioritised on your dashboard by potential for improvement so you can quickly and easily spot where your organisation is an outlier.

25 Oct 2019

OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 3

This is the third instalment in our series of commentaries on using reference ranges to interpret pathology test results. Reference ranges vary between labs Classically, the reference range is defined statistically: it is the interval within which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. Therefore 2.5% of the time, healthy people will have (for example) haemoglobin concentrations less than the lower limit, and 2.5% of the time it will be over the upper limit.

24 Oct 2019

OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 2

This is the second installment in our series of commentaries on reference ranges used to interpret pathology test results. Here we describe two issues relating to how meaningful reference ranges are. Reference ranges are usually indicators of statistical outliers in a healthy reference population The most common type of reference range is defined as the interval between which 95% of the values of a healthy reference population fall into. In other words, 2.

23 Oct 2019

OpenPathology: Issues with reference ranges — Part 1

As the OpenPathology project has progressed, we have started to build measures to describe variation between practices, and groups of practices. While comparing rates of requests per head of population can be used as a simple measure of possible over- or under-use of tests compared to other practices, it doesn’t take into account the general health needs of the population, so it can be difficult to rule out warranted variation. Therefore, comparing variation in rates of abnormal results is another useful measure to consider.

14 Oct 2019

OpenPathology: fake seasonality in potassium results — dangerous and avoidable

In our initial analyses of pathology data from the South West for our OpenPathology.net project, there is a pronounced (sometimes extreme) increase in high potassium results during the winter months, and a corresponding increase in low-potassium results in summer: What’s causing it? The level of potassium in plasma within a blood sample is affected by temperature. Potassium can move into and out of blood cells during storage: in cooler temperatures, potassium diffuses out of cells into plasma, leading to the reading being artefactually higher, while in higher temperatures an enzyme works to pump potassium into the cells.

14 Oct 2019

OpenPathology: Seasonality in Haemoglobin test results

In our initial analyses of pathology data from the South West for our OpenPathology.net project, we have noticed subtle but consistent variation in haemoglobin test results throughout the year. Haemoglobin (Hb) levels falling below certain threshold values typically give a diagnosis of anaemia. In the following regional sample we see that the mean Hb concentration across both males and females differs by 2-3 g/l between the summer low and the winter peak:

9 Oct 2019

New Measure — Inhalers and the Environment

At the Bennett Institute we regularly collaborate on projects, both small and large, with users who get in touch. For development of this measure we would like to thank the NHS England Sustainable Unit and Centre for Sustainable Healthcare for their input on our work to support the NHS Long Term Plan. Another one of our collaborators on this work is Nicola Read, a respiratory doctor who is currently one of the National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellows.

9 Oct 2019

New Measure: Seven Day Prescribing for Long-term Conditions

This week we launched a new measure of seven day prescription for medicines used to treat long-term conditions. There is no current consensus on duration of prescription across the NHS and prescribers are advised that they should write a prescription for a duration that is clinically appropriate. For medicines that are for stable long-term conditions many areas have policies in place recommending one, two, or three month prescriptions. What are Medicines Compliance Aids?