Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

24 Apr 2019

Communicating variation in prescribing - Why We Use Deciles

On OpenPrescribing.net we provide data for individual practices and CCGs (and now STPs and regions!) making it easier for everyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in England - supporting safer, more efficient prescribing. However, providing data for an individual location in isolation is rarely useful. We need to provide context, so that some sort of judgement can be made about whether the prescribing in question is especially high or low, and how extreme it is, in comparison with others.

24 Apr 2019

Openness and Transparency: why is openness and transparency important for good data analysis and how does OpenPrescribing embody it?

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. This blog sets out the steps we take with OpenPrescribing.net to ensure all our analysis and methodology is freely available for inspection, review, and importantly re-use, by anyone.

21 Mar 2019

NHS price concessions cost charities and local authorities an additional £5.6 million last year

In the last year we estimate that price concessions have cost an additional £165 million in unplanned expenditure for Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), and our OpenPrescribing.net price concession calculator was featured in a major BBC news story and in the Pharmaceutical Journal this week. However, interestingly, NHS price concessions do not just affect the NHS: they also represent unplanned expenditure for charities, local councils, and others. Here, we report our estimate of the impact on non-CCG organisations as an additional £5.

20 Mar 2019

NHS Regional and STP Dashboards — A new Feature on OpenPrescribing

Today we launched NHS regional and STP dashboards on <OpenPrescribing.net>, which allow anyone to see NHS prescribing patterns across areas larger than CCGs. You can find these new dashboards under “Area and Practice Dashboards”. What is an NHS STP or Region? The NHS across England is now organised into Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) and NHS England regions. There are 44 STPs made up of NHS organisations such as CCGs and hospital trusts, and local councils, who developed shared proposals to improve health and social care, whilst ensuring services are joined up across all of the organisations they incorporate.

6 Mar 2019

FDAAA TrialsTracker: Milestones and Methodology Updates

It’s been a busy start to the year for the FDAAA TrialsTracker! As the FDAAA TrialsTracker celebrates its 1 year anniversary, we now show over 1000 trials currently overdue to report under the FDA Amendments Act of 2007 (some background on our tracker and the FDAAA 2007 here). Additionally, we estimate that the FDA could have collected over $2 billion in fines if they were enforcing these requirements. To date, we have no evidence they have issued even a single dollar in fines.

28 Feb 2019

Building new prescribing measures - we need your help

At OpenPrescribing we have a range of prescribing measures that makes it easier for everyone to explore NHS prescribing patterns in England - supporting safer, more efficient prescribing. We now have 70 measures including our two latest on Freestyle Libre and herbal medicines, that we recently blogged about. The measures are available for for every single practice and CCG in England and cover a range of clinical areas such as medication safety and antimicrobial stewardship to support better prescribing.

28 Feb 2019

OpenPrescribing February 2019 newsletter

New Price Concessions alerts We have introduced a new email alert service, built upon our recently-launched NHS Price Concession calculator, which shows the cost impact of concessions for every single practice, CCG and for all of England combined. If you sign up for these new alerts, an email will pop into your inbox soon after a new price concession is announced (approximately once per week) to update you on the impact these costs are predicted to have on your practice/CCG.

22 Feb 2019

Ghost Branded Generics - How to fix it

Ghost Branded Generics are a relatively new category of cost-saving opportunities, caused by prescribers specifying a manufacturer for a generic product, often resulting in a higher reimbursement price compared to the true generic. We estimate the problem costs the NHS £11.6m a year. We have written about this extensively since our first blog on discovering the issue and developed a Ghost Branded Generics dashboard and measure for every practice and CCG in England.

21 Feb 2019

NHS Price Concession Alerts — A new feature on OpenPrescribing

Today we launched a new feature on OpenPrescribing: an NHS Price Concession email alerts service. This is in addition to our existing calculator that shows cost impact of price concessions, which can already be viewed on every practice, CCG and All England dashboard. You can read more about price concessions (aka NCSO) in our previous blogs. Many users of OpenPrescribing receive our monthly newsletter and our innovative email alert service for practice and CCG prescribing measures.

21 Feb 2019

Retracted RCTs and clinical guidelines

As you know, here at the Bennett Institute we are working on the RetractoBot project to reduce the number of cited retracted papers. Citations of retracted RCTs are particularly dangerous because such trials provide strong and unbiased evidence of treatment’s safety and efficacy (hierarchy of evidence). Moreover, results of RCTs are often pooled in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, which are used to synthesise the available evidence on a given subject or to justify clinical guidelines.

19 Feb 2019

QIPP Planning: How To…

…Identify CCG Cost Savings Opportunities using OpenPrescribing.net Every year in the NHS local teams around the country put together “QIPP Plans”. QIPP stands for Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention and is a large scale programme introduced across the NHS to ensure the NHS delivers more for the same funding. We make no comment on the programme itself but we think OpenPrescribing is a useful tool in helping develop “QIPP Plans” and to identify new areas for savings related to medicines spend.

18 Feb 2019

Trial Reporting at NHS Trusts in England

Nearly all trials of medicinal products conducted in Europe since 2004 are required to post their results directly onto the EU trials register within one year of completion. Since September, our EU TrialsTracker has monitored all clinical trials in the EU to check whether they are compliant. Recently we produced a specific report on data on trial reporting at UK Universities: the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee is currently using this data to alert Universities and monitor their current reporting performance.

11 Feb 2019

Two new measures on OpenPrescribing — Herbal medicines and Freestyle Libre

We have recently released two new measures on OpenPrescribing — the prescribing costs of herbal medicines, and the quantity of Freestyle Libre. Herbal medicines For techie reasons, we’re quite excited about the herbal medicines measure. We don’t like to write measures that require a manually managed list of preparations, as these require a lot of curation, and can quickly become inaccurate if a new drug is released. Therefore for most (if not all) of our measures we use the hierarchical BNF codes provided by the NHS Business Services Authority (you can read more on these here).

31 Jan 2019

New Year Updates to the EU TrialsTracker

Our EU TrialsTracker has been live for 4 months providing data on who is and isn’t meeting EU trial reporting guidelines. The tracker reached a major milestone last week when our data was used by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee to inform UK Universities of their current reporting performance and remind them of their ethical and legal obligations to report their sponsored trials. As some of our regular users may have spotted, we’ve recently make some changes to the EU TrialsTracker.

29 Jan 2019

Adventures in time travel with the Drug Tariff

While investigating the data behind Ghost Branded Generics, we came across something that we didn’t expect. As part of our work in creating the Drug Tariff viewer (once we’d managed to obtain the data), we’ve got an archive of Drug Tariff (DT) prices going back to 2010. We used our DT archive to compare listed reimbursement prices with what was actually being paid for generics, we sometimes found that the price paid wasn’t the one listed in the tariff.

29 Jan 2019

Ghost Branded Generics - Positive News!

Before Christmas we wrote about Ghost Branded Generics, a very nerdy story about a problem we uncovered that costs the NHS………£11.6million a year. Since then we have launched a freely accessible Ghost Branded Generics dashboard on Openprescribing.net for every practice and CCG in the country; and a Ghost Branded Generics measure so practices and CCGs can track their prescribing of Ghost Branded Generics over time. We have also had lots of people get in touch about this whole new category of NHS savings.

24 Jan 2019

Science and Technology Select Committee Chair Uses EU TrialsTracker Data in Letters to UK Universities

Yesterday, we shared an overview of trial reporting performance for all UK Universities on our EU TrialsTracker and FDAAA TrialsTracker. Today, we are pleased to see this data being put to good use. Following-up on the October 2018 report on clinical trials transparency, the chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Norman Lamb MP, has sent letters to 41 universities with trials registered on the EU Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR).

23 Jan 2019

Trial Reporting at UK Universities

Our EU TrialsTracker has now been live for four months. As of 10 January 2019, we have identified 8,062 trials registered in Europe that are unambiguously due to report results under EU guidelines; a total of 4,323 (53.6%) trials have reported results to the registry. We have also seen some institutions — for example Kings College London — improve their trial reporting performance dramatically and rapidly. Our BMJ paper showed that non-commercial sponsors (mostly universities) were substantially worse at reporting results to the registry, when compared with drug companies.