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Latest news and views from around the Bennett Institute

  1. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    What is OpenSAFELY?

    What is OpenSAFELY? Working on behalf of NHS England we have now built a full, open source, highly secure analytics platform running across the full pseudonymised primary care records of 24 million people, rising soon to 55 million, 95% of the population of England. We have pursued a new model: for privacy, security, low cost, and near-real-time data access, we have built the analytics platform inside the EHR data centre of the major EHR providers, where the data already resides; in addition we have built software that uses tiered increasingly non-disclosive tables to prevent researchers ever needing direct access to the disclosive underlying data to run analyses; code is developed against simulated data using open platforms before moving to the live data environment.

  2. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing July Newsletter

    OpenPrescribing and Bennett Institute Papers It has been a busy month for paper publication at The Bennett Institute. We have written a brief description of the most recent papers below. Please sharewith colleagues and get in touch if you have any relevant observations! Remember you can read all our academic papers related to OpenPrescribing on our research page. Hospital medicines data: We are frequently contacted at OpenPrescribing about when we are going to make a hospital version.

  3. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS Dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d): primary care prescribing of "hospital only" medicines

    Update May 2021 Based on feedback received from users, the NHS dictionary of medicines and devices has decided to cease maintenance of the “hospital only” value at AMP level (it remains at AMPP level). As a result this means that we are no longer able to produce our “Hospital Only measure” and we have retired it. Just prior to the COVID-19 emergency we launched a new measure on OpenPrescribing, primary care prescribing of medicines defined by the NHS dictionary of medicines (dm+d) and devices as “hospital only”.

  4. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    How I use OpenPrescribing in my practice as a GP

    A guest blog from Dr. Kevin Barrett (Twitter @DrKBarrett). Last week the British Journal of General Practice published our paper on unsafe prescribing of methotrexate. As part of the publication Dr. Kevin Barrett talked to BJGP (see video below) about how he used OpenPrescribing to identify potentially unsafe prescribing in his practice and has also written a short blog below. When I first started as a GP trainee in 1999 electronic prescribing was a relatively recent innovation.

  5. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing June Newsletter

    Methotrexate Prescribing Safety — New paper in BJGP This week the British Journal of General Practice published our latest paper on unsafe prescribing of methotrexate. We found that the prevalence of unsafe methotrexate prescribing (10mg tablets) has reduced but remains common, with substantial variation between practices and CCGs. In the paper we also discuss recommendations for better strategies around implementation. Anyone can view the live data on unsafe methotrexate prescribing at openprescribing.

  6. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Your Organisation's OpenPrescribing Custom Email Alerts

    At OpenPrescribing we know that clinicians can be overwhelmed with guidance and data about many different aspects of care. We therefore have developed an innovative email alert service for every single practice, primary care network and clinical commissioning group in England that delivers bespoke custom emails to your inbox about your own organisations prescribing. To sign up to your organisation’s alerts all you need to do is: Go your organisation’s homepage.

  7. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    OpenPrescribing Newsletter May 2020

    OpenSAFELY.org OpenSAFELY is a new secure analytics platform for electronic health records in the NHS, created to deliver urgent results during the global COVID-19 emergency. OpenSAFELY is a collaboration between the Bennett Institute, the EHR group at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and TPP who produce SystmOne. OpenSAFELY is now successfully delivering analyses across more than 24 million patients’ full pseudonymised primary care NHS records. The first analysis from OpenSAFELY is Factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death in the linked electronic health records of 17 million adult NHS patients with more answers to important questions expected shortly.

  8. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenSAFELY

    Impact of COVID-19 on prescribing in English general practice: March 2020

    OpenPrescribing.net has been updated this week with the latest release of prescribing data covering March 2020. In-depth analysis will be needed over the coming months, but this release gives us the first glimpse into the impact that COVID-19 has had on prescribing. At the Bennett Institute we have been quite busy with the new secure analytics platform OpenSAFELY but the following blog is a rapid analysis of the March prescribing data which others may find helpful to focus their own investigations.

  9. Posted
    Categories
    • Code

    COVID-19 TrialsTracker

    This repository contains the data cleaning notebook, all necessary datasets, and the code for running the COVID-19 TrialsTracker website at covid19.trialstracker.net. Docker files are included to ensure a consistent environment for reproducibility.

  10. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    What are the most commonly prescribed medicines? Top 10 prescribed medicines in NHS England primary care for 2019

    The following is a rapid analysis of the “top 10” medicines in NHS England primary care in 2019. We prepared this analysis for a user who wanted to use the list in a teaching session with students to prepare them for the medicines they will most commonly see in general practice. We are sure others will find it useful — please get in touch and tell us how you use it via Twitter or feedback@openprescribing.

  12. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    Changes to NHS medicines data: a rapid analysis from the Bennett Institute

    At the Bennett Institute we like to work in the open and share our insights for the whole community, so we can fix a problem for us, then share the solution, and help fix it for everyone. We think this is efficient for us and the whole system. In this blog our magnificent coder Peter Inglesby sets out some analysis he has done of changes to the NHS prescribing data we use.

  13. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    NHS England Investment and Impact Fund — A new dashboard on OpenPrescribing

    Update September 2020: NHS England have announced a reduction in the number of planned measures including the majority of the measures on OpenPrescribing. We will remove the IIF dashboard in a future update. Update: Due to COVID19 response NHS England has announced that the IIF will be postponed. We will continue to make this dashboard available as NHS England also states that they will continue to monitor the data to understand any impact.

  14. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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.

  15. Posted
    Categories
    • Open Working

    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. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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.

  18. Posted
    Categories
    • OpenPrescribing

    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.